PlanGuru University Class Materials

Hi, everybody. Christian Wiles. Dan Weiss here. Welcome to I don't know how many installments of PlanGuru University we've done at this point, but it's it's quite a bit. But this is an exciting one because our new dashboarding and AI intelligence software that we've talked about many PlanGurus before this is is in production, and we've got dozens of users even though it was tax season when we rolled out. We got a ton of people using it and, couldn't be happier in terms of, how smoothly the onboarding process go has gone for such a big, huge rollout. So we're excited to, again, work that into everything we're gonna be talking about today, and, and welcome. So let me, I'm gonna just do some housekeeping here. I'll give Dan a second to introduce himself in a minute here. But this you do you know, this is six full hours, so you get seven CPE credits. So you do need to attend you know, you don't cut out twenty minutes early every time. You know, you gotta attend the full six hours to get the credits. We need you to attend eighty we need you to answer eighty percent of poll questions, and that's gonna get you your CPE. When you once you've once you feel like you've satisfied that, simply email p g u at PlanGuru dot com, and we'll get you your CPE certificates. And then, you know, there's sort of a second level to this. Folks looking for a certification, we can give you a little badge that you can put on your website. You know, obviously, mandatory, but, is, to get PlanGuru certified. And you can do that one of two ways. You can do that by doing you know, we're gonna give you a couple case studies as we go through this. If you complete those case studies and show them to us, we'll get you certified. However, I don't actually recommend that you work on a case study. I I recommend that you work on a real life project. Again, if you don't have any, if you're if you're new to this, if you're new to the fractional CFO game and before you spend time with a client, you want something to work on, hey. We, you know, jump in the case studies. But, preferably, you can pick a client and don't charge them anything and just get started with some real life project, and we can also then take a look at what you built and verify you that PlanGuru is certified. So in terms of what we're going to talk about class by class today, we're going to obviously, we're doing an introduction right now, but we're also gonna spend some time talking about why are you here. What what what types of services does PlanGuru facilitate? What type of internal processes do we facilitate, and how can you get the most out of the software? And then finally, I'm gonna kick it to Dan Luis, who's going to spend some time talking about setup and import, with a with a new PlanGuru model. So just a few more notes. If you're using PlanGuru internally, I do apologize. A lot of the curriculum here is geared towards, accounting firms, who either currently offer fractional CFO services or are attempting to offer fractional CFO services or, dedicated fractional CFOs. So, obviously, the lessons that we, anything we talk about in respect to a business adviser is applicable to you. But, again, sorry, but a lot again, a lot of my asides, a lot of our general comments are gonna pertain to, working with clients and things like that. So, hopefully, it's not too too much. Additionally, if you are an expert's fractional CFO, you will be bored during sections applying your university. We really try to you know, especially here in the first session, we really try to take it from the top, you know, take it for, you know, I don't know, the foundation and build up from there. So, again, apologize in advance to some of you who are just here to see the new, you know, features. Again, we will spend a lot of time on the basics. And, you know, it's not too late to get into this PlanGuru University semester. If somebody, you know, watches the recordings and talks to us and then they jump in for the last two sessions, we can still give them the CPE credit. We can even offer a makeup session if somebody, needs to. So just to give you guys a little background on myself, my name is Christian Wilege. I'm the CEO over here at PlanGuru. Prior to PlanGuru, I was the worldwide plan analyst at IBM. I for their sorry. The worldwide plan analyst of the global technology services group, building a thirty seven billion dollar budget in Excel, not, you know, not not, like, not a IBM product. Hopefully, I'm not violating any agreements I signed by telling you that and recording it and putting it on the Internet. But yeah. So I I will say a lot of my perspective, you know, like, some of the curriculum in here, some of the lessons that we teach, I'd say, are a symptom of of that corporate finance background. You know? And I try to take that lens and apply it to the smallest of businesses because we can apply those same principles to the smallest of businesses, but I don't you know, the a lot of times, I think the language in the small business space, you know, is too simplified to to to really help business owners understand what they need to be doing to make better decisions. Obviously, since I joined PlanGuru, I've worked with thousands of businesses. I've issued I you know, I did the calculation of ten thousand CPE credits many years ago, so it's probably something like fifteen now of of CPE credits in PlanGuru University and beyond. So, with me as always, is, Dan Weiss, who's, you know, probably the best single best PlanGuru user on the planet right now, probably better than me at this point, but I wanna say hi, Dan. Hello, everybody. Dan here. Very excited for you to join us, this session and this, semester of PlanGuru University. Like Krishna said, we have some really exciting stuff to show you. And I do see some fill familiar names in the attendees list here. So, again, thanks for joining. But for the folks that don't, know me, we who I haven't met yet, I'm an account executive with PlanGuru. And although I am focused, you know, mostly on the sales side of things, so, you know, talking to new people who are looking at PlanGuru solutions like PlanGuru and making sure it's a good fit for them. But, you know, once they decide that's the case, I'm also heavily involved in the implementation side of things too, so helping them get it set up. And, you know, we get down to the nitty gritty. Right? We do what's called blueprinting, where we dissect how the business operates. We go account by account, identify the ones that have the biggest impact on the business, things like breaking down revenue streams, payroll by employee, you know, balance sheet accounts that have a major impact on cash flow forecasting. And we really get into the detail of the drivers that are behind those accounts and, you know, try and get as accurate as possible. And also put together some really nice reporting packages so, you know, you can tell that story, based on what your targets are and what's actually happening, which, you know, Krishna is gonna talk about why that's so important. And, you know, with some of the new functionality that we're gonna show, you know, in class three and and throughout, you know, it it it just makes your life or your client's life way, way easier as opposed to doing this stuff, say, in Excel spreadsheet. So really excited to get started here. I will be monitoring the chat window as well as the q and a window. So you can ask a question question in either or, and I'll make sure to answer those to the best of my ability. And, yeah, let's kick it off. You know, Sally, for those of you who are here to see the new stuff, you know, it kinda is in the last class. But, and that no. That's not the same. I'm not wearing the same shirt as in that picture. It just kinda looks the same. I just realized that. Now everybody knows I only owe I only own one quarter zip. Yeah. You don't wanna know how old these pictures are. So just a little background on PlanGuru. The first version of PlanGuru came out in two thousand. We had we had two desktop products. We had another desktop product we released around two thousand ten, eleven. You know, doing financial modeling in a browser is not an easy thing to do. You know, you folks want instant responsivity when you change your browser when you change something in the model, and you don't wanna sit there and wait for fifteen seconds if something goes back to a browser and loads a new report or something in your window. You know? So we waited to go to the cloud until we knew we could deliver a fast, responsive, powerful thing. And, again, I gotta update my slide. It's it's it's more than twenty three years later. Shoot. I thought I I thought I scrubbed any typos then. I spent some time in here. But yeah. And we work with all types of businesses directly ranging from pre revenue start ups to large multinational corporations and everything in between. And, obviously, with the smaller businesses, a lot of those businesses are working with a business adviser who's got PlanGuru. But, you know, we we've really improved our the AI in our solution, both on the reporting side and the financial modeling side. We have a huge robust, library of tutorials. But, you know, at PlanGuru, we go beyond simply developing software. You know, we really spend a lot of time teaching advisers and businesses on how to make better decisions, train accounts, bookkeepers, advisers on how to provide these services and connect organizations that that are a good fit. And and finally, you know, you're you're never gonna find a you're never gonna find a company at our price point that has anything like the level of customer support we have. If there's anyone in here that's new, you know, again, we I can put any of our existing users on the spot, and they can tell you. We're here when you need us. You know, this is this is the hardest thing. Like, this is the Apex service. And, you know, when you're sitting there with a client that that maybe has four QuickBooks classes and you don't know, hey. Should I break this out by class, or should I just kinda import at the all classes level and keep this thing simple? You know, you could sit down. You could have a meeting with Dan, and I could give you one recommendation, and then you or he could give you one recommendation, then you can meet with me the next day. And I might give you a different recommendation because there is a lot of nuance in it depending on the questions we ask and the other context included in the conversation. You know? Two completely informed users might make two completely different decisions, and that's why we'd like to get together. You know, that's why if you're ever building a new model and you want some help, you'll always be able to get some time with myself or Dan, Wees. Or if you just have those quick questions, it's not like, hey. It's on some big existential problem. It's just, oh god. I don't know how to answer this question, and I wanna make sure I build this model right. Well, you can also pick up the phone. And, you know, I always say, call the support line first. You know, if nobody picks up, call call the sales line. You know? If you're doing an implementation for even if you're an existing customer, if you're building something new, if you're adding some more departments or adding some new users, or if you're adding a new client, that's sales. We're happy to help. And and, again, leave a message. If if if we're really jammed up and nobody can pick up the phone right there, leave a message, and someone's gonna call you back shortly. So just wanted to say all that before we get in here. So what's our first poll question? Do am I Dan, where where are they? Why Should be in the control panel there? Question one. Let's go to court. It's question one. So, before you know, how about this? Let's just get a sense for what best describes you. Are you gonna be using PlanGuru internally? Are you a dedicated fractional CFO that would prefer never to have any accounting responsibilities? But, you know, obviously, sometimes you get sucked in when you have to. Are you a traditional accounting firm, that does everything but has fractional CFO as a part of their portfolio? Sorry. Sorry. A traditional accounting firm that does not do fractional CFO and maybe doesn't even know if they wanna offer it, but you are getting here to learn and you wanna look and and potentially partner with a fractional CFO. And then and then the fourth option is a one stop shop, meaning you're an accounting firm. You can do the QuickBooks setup. You can close the books, and you can operate the fractional CFO meeting. And then finally, other. So, again, the I saw I saw that shift dramatically. So if you if you're a fractional CFO, the last thing you wanna have to do is open up QuickBooks. And maybe maybe you're a one stop shop, and the last thing you wanna but you're a fractional CFO, you make it a point not to own the accounting processes. If you're a one stop shop, you, would like to capture as much of the client's business as possible. Okay. Cool. That shifted quite a bit. Woah. Sorry. I almost just spilled my drink here. I'm gonna end the poll. Share the results. Okay. So, yeah, eight eighteen percent. So let me show you. Eighteen percent internally, eighteen percent fractional CFO, nine percent is characterize themselves traditional accounting services. Maybe you don't know if you wanna offer fractional CFO through in house or through partnership. One stop shop can do it all, wants to do it all, and then other. Other, if you could tell us if you could try to fit yourself into one of these boxes, the two others out there, that would be really cool in the chat field, and Dan will let us know next time we take a break. So why are we here? Why are you here? Okay? Back to my sort of IBM perspective. You know? When you're at IBM, you're sort of sort of kinda three when you're in accounting finance, there's sort of three parts to it, and I'll and I'll touch upon this in the I'll I'll touch upon the first one on the next slide. But most of the most of the folks are either in the accounting department, meaning they're, you know, talking to their team in the field, like, you know, can I book this revenue for this month? Do I you know, how this service contract, how am I supposed to amortize out this revenue and the service contract so that the people in the finance team have completely finalized good sound books that they could analyze and then do financial projections from. Right? You know, that's, the point of the finance team. So PlanGuru is the tool of the CFO, is the tool of the finance team or the finance department. And, you know, and we're sort of making the assumption that, you know, the books are closed. And, you know, again, that's not always the case that our customers come to us with either accounting house in order, But, you know, we can give you some advice on what you should do if your accounting is a mess, but, you know, it's not it's not somewhere we can help you. But, however, when the accounting house is in order and we have good data, then we can do all types of exciting things with that information. You know, the first is a budgeting process. Right? And what's a budget? A budget is a comprehensive set of goals of what we hope to achieve. It's aspirational. So if everybody does a good job, our our analysis of the market is correct, We can achieve five percent revenue growth and, and six percent profit growth by by cutting costs and becoming more efficient. And it's what we're gonna hold any team members accountable to. Right? There's multiple levels to this. In a true small business where the business owner is making all the big decisions, it's you and the owner, and and that's it. And sometimes the budgeting process, isn't as valuable. If it's just you and the owner and there's nobody to say, hey. You didn't hit your budget. What's going on? Then the the the the budgeting budgeting is about setting targets and holding people accountable to those targets. But the moment you have more than just the business owner, the more the the moment you have a sales manager who's important in making spend decisions and how we should travel and spend, online marketing resources, okay, Those people should be involved in a budgeting process, and and and they need to be and maybe it's just a fifteen minute touch point once a month where they look at their dashboard and they spin their their part of the forecast. But, again, the you've got you in the honor, and the and then the only thing you communicate to anyone outside of that core leadership group is the budget, what we expect you to do. Okay? Then you have a rolling forecast. What's a rolling forecast? After you met with the sales manager, after you met with the production manager, after you asked them a bunch of questions and gave them a whole bunch of ideas of how they can make better decisions throughout the month to make more money, you could come out of the room and you go, we ain't hitting that sales budget, are we? And you say no, and then you bust out the rolling forecast. Okay. So sometimes you do that. So, hopefully hopefully, you're saying, yes. Of course, we're gonna that we don't even need to spend any time on the forecast. It's perfect. But most of the time, you're gonna get into the forecast. And and, again, a forecast shouldn't be aspirational. It should be what you really think is gonna happen. And in the event that you're a cash strapped business, it should probably be slightly pessimistic. Right? Not just where we think we're gonna land, but let's say where we think we're gonna land, and let's dial it down five percent and still make sure we can meet our obligations and make the investments we need to make and make payroll and and do all that stuff. Okay? So budget aspirational, what we're driving towards, rolling forecast, sober assessment of where we're really headed for senior most leadership. And and and and quite frankly, those that that budgeting so month months over, books are closed. We go well, let's just say this. Every day and and we're gonna talk more about this in class three. But you might have two sets of deliverables to your client. You might might you might have a mid month scorecard where only those things that are pretty accurate on a daily basis are delivered to the client's desk every morning. Revenue. Revenue revenue hits the pay the system. It gets booked into QuickBooks. We can pull up a pie chart every morning that shows us revenue. Same with, payroll. Okay? We have a mid month scorecard that they can look at every day so they can log in and see how they're doing against their budget. And then at the end of the month, when the books are closed and everything's reconciled, then we have that end of the month exhaustive review where we compare the budget to the actuals. We hold team members accountable. We kick those team members out of the room, and then we respin the forecast. K? That is the bread and butter cadence for all the fractional c for most of the fractional CFOs we work with. K? The date the now that we have PlanGuru Analytics, our new reporting package, the daily deliverables delivered without any work, but the monthly deliverable becomes for a small client, for a two million dollar revenue single QuickBooks class company, that monthly pre meeting prep, it's not two hours anymore. It's it's it's twenty minutes. And then you jump into the meeting, you spin the forecast. And so all of this, what we have here today is gonna dramatically reduce the cost of delivering a much more robust thing to the client, and it's gonna transform your ability to serve clients with at a lot lower cost. And there's so much opportunity in the market, in that in that lower, middle, you know, that that safe you know, two to twenty million dollar revenue range. There's so much opportunity there. And with, you know, and with everything we're gonna take you through in this class, you're gonna be able to either, again, get in there and be that fractional CFO or recommend a fractional CFO, or, you're gonna be able to do it in house for the for the two folks that are that are trying to do this stuff internally. Strategic planning, we we can go up to ten years in PlanGuru. I don't wanna diminish strategic planning clearly once a year. You should get all the critical stakeholders, all the shareholders together. You should show a ten year projection, explain to everybody how much money they're gonna get over the next ten years, explain to everybody what the long term objectives are, and and and then the first year of that strategic plan is used as a guideline for building the budget. Right? So once a year, she get everybody together, have your debates about what the strategic direction of the company is. Are we do we wanna just pay a heavy dividend, or do we wanna try to grow and capture new markets? Everyone has that debate. Once that debate's been settled by ownership, you then can either use that same model because it's a small business. Right? So for larger businesses, you might need different models to do all these things. Right? You might have a detailed operating budget, but something higher level for your rolling forecast in your strategic plan. Or your you might your detailed operating budget might also be a forecast, but then you have a different PlanGuru project for your strategic plan. Finally, I'll just this is this is our home page, you know, if anyone don't recognize it, but we are also here for PlanGuru launch services. If if it's ever a how do I do it question or what should I do question, if you're a business adviser, it's probably gonna be free. If it if we get to the end of that meeting and you say to yourself, oh god. I'm really busy. I would you know, it'd be really and then we say, hey. You know, we can get this done for five hundred bucks, and it'll all be updated in there for you tomorrow morning. A lot of times folks say, oh, please. Yes. Absolutely. You know? And we save you ten hours of work or whatever it would have taken you. So we're here to offer all the guidance and support, when it comes to design and how to use the product. But when it comes down to building it, we offer, again, extremely reasonable support services, and we're really good and efficient at doing it. So okay. Let's do another poll question here. So if you are a business advisory firm, if you if you're one of those two in house folks hey, Dan. Did we get an answer on what those others were? No answer just yet. If you guys wanna share, you could type it right into Chatfield, and I'll see it. Uh-oh. We better get to the bottom of who this is. Well, we got one SBDC. Oh, cool. That's one. What let's Dan, do me a favor. See see who the SBDC is and, talk about it in our next poll break. Okay? So Again, if you are a business adviser, answer the question appropriately. If you're not a business adviser, you know, and you don't need CPE, you don't have to answer. However, if you do need CPE, just answer, just put something in there. Okay. I'm gonna close the poll in five four three two one. Lot of, varying sizes of firms in here. Okay. So when a cuss when a when a when a when a new business comes to us and that business, you know, is again, let's say it's a two million dollar business. You got a business owner who hears about how they should budget and forecast all the time, they've stumbled across PlanGuru, and they they set up a meeting with Dan. And, you know, I kinda sort of break things down into there's three areas that you that these people need help. You know? First, and is it which an extraordinarily sized problem for us is that they don't have their systems set up right. Okay? You know? Or the people aren't communicating and using the systems to their fullest of their capabilities. Obviously, I'm gonna know, I'm a I was working with a customer who owns a hotel, small, single entity hotel, you know, decent size, but, you know, they didn't get their books closed till the twentieth of the month. And they were paying for Bill dot com, which, again, the majority of the stuff was either, you know, invoices coming in or bills they need to pay or, you know? And the the the person at the hotel was scanning all the bills and invoices, sending them in one big email to the accounting firm that sat on them for weeks, and then processed them all on the nineteenth of the month or whatever. I literally, I get on the call. I'm like, hey. I I go to a lot of I don't I never use any of these apps, but I go to enough trade shows to be dangerous. Can't she just get a Bill dot com app and scan these things herself, and then they magically show up in the numbers the next morning. Like, everybody tells like, Joe Woodard tells me they're going to. And he's like, well, yeah, but we'd have to get her a login. And I go, well, can we get her a login? And he's like, yeah. Yeah. No problem. You know? And it's so, again, if if if if all our problems in life were only that simple, you know, this would all be easy. But but my point is is that, you know, we need to have good processes in place, whether it's an internal team, whether it's an external accounting firm, so that we minimize the work the work work stream too. And that so that the more data we have that's real time, the more data that we can include in that mid month scorecard as opposed to that month end close. Like, again, when we get over into PlanGuru Analytics, you're gonna see we have the ability to create as many different dashboards as you want. But the more stuff the more we can make that mid month scorecard resemble the end of the month full diagnostic, the better we are. You know? And the more real time our data can be, the closer we can get to that and the more value that a daily dashboard has to your clients. So, you know, that that's kind of the first area that that folks need help. The second area is, you know, finalizing historical data so it's accurate, timely. Some transactions cannot AI cannot interpret every transaction. Sometimes, you know, two two systems aren't, you know, sometimes you just are forced to use some antiquated system, and it requires some series of manual journal entries. There's nothing you could do about it. You you know, and and you gotta handle it, and you gotta get it done. And and you wanna get it done in a timely fashion so that that that and you gotta act and if you're the fractional CFO, you gotta push the accounting firm to get things done on a timely basis. It can be an awkward conversation. I can tell you that that that conversation was fairly awkward because as it went along, it it the the more the conversation was like, well, there's what you know, what's the accounting firm still gonna be doing if she's got bill dot com and, yeah, pushing everything through. But, you know, that's the that's the that's the dinosaur accounting firm's problem that didn't be responsive to what their clients' needs were and what their clients wanted. So once we get fast phase two, the books are closed. We got clean numbers. We got accurate, timely, sufficiently detailed financials for the finance department. Then we can do our strategic planning, our budgeting, forecasting, our performance review, all that all that good stuff. So I thought I had a more specific poll question that pertained to this, but maybe we get rid of it. And finally, you know, like, when you do a good job with all this other stuff, the the tax and compliance just, you know, kinda becomes automated. So from my perspective, again, you know, I, this I don't have any, data to back this up. You know? But there's so many nonresponsive accounting firms that view that one to five million or that one to ten million dollar QuickBooks business simply from a compliance standpoint, a compliance and tax standpoint. And, oh, they didn't complain that they don't get the books closed till the twentieth of the month, so that must be good enough. And these arcane processes we have are fine because they're not complaining. You can come in to these businesses either yourself or with a good stable of partners. You can automate all the nonsense that should have been automated, reduce that so that no one has to do that anymore. You can come in bolt on the fractional CFO, come in at the same or similar price. Again, a lot of these business owners are happy to do certain functions in house and take that work off the accounting firm's plate and take it in house if it's this if it's literally the same amount of work they were doing before. You know? So, anyway, so if you could just do me a favor. Okay? And then this is an elaboration on the previous question. Just in the chat field, okay, which this is just again, I should have had the poll question aligned with this. But which description best fits you? You pry you provide primarily fractional CFO services and would prefer to avoid any business I call it I call it BPOP, not business process outsourcing, but business process optimization. We're not gonna necessarily outsource everything. We're gonna give the owner of the hotel bill dot com, the app bill dot com, and have them scan the thing so that instead of them sending pictures of the stuff for the accounting firm to scan the thing. Okay? So you you primarily provide fractional CFI and prefer to avoid any of that app in QuickBooks. You wanna be a one stop shop. You wanna be the one who comes in there, fixes up the QuickBooks, gets Bill dot com working, gets, you know, all the apps talking. You provide the business process optimization. You provide the accounting services to support a fractional CFO or in house CFO. However, you need to learn what the c sorry. You don't wanna do the CFO, but you wanna support the CFO. You're here you're here to know so that you're not that dinosaur accounting firm, so that you you know what a CFO needs. You know how to get the book set up so that if a CFO comes in, you can do it right. And you potentially be looking to refer to somebody to actually do the CFO work. Four is a hybrid. You you work with the small ones, but you find a partner for the big ones. And and five is I don't know yet. Sorry. Again, didn't mean to belabor all this stuff, but I like to provide a real, you know, good foundation of where everybody sits. So your team. Okay? We typically find that the best construct to do this stuff effectively, and it's kinda how we operate here at PlanGuru, our two person teams. You've got the true CFO who is gonna be driving those discussions about what the client needs from a budgeting and forecasting process. They're going to be, in their head, architecting what the PlanGuru model should look like by asking them questions about their business, asking them questions about the priorities, all in the context of what their budget for your services are. Then you have a budget analyst. They can go off and build that thing. You know? Because, obviously, if you're a smaller firm, you know, in the beginning, when you don't have a lot of clients, well, one person can totally do all these things. But once you start getting the scale, you know, it's a different set of skills. And, you know, it's a good, to be able to sort of share the the labor when it comes to that. You know, in terms of your process, whether you wanna do that internally for everything, you know, again, if you are it it's it's if you know the client needs some help on the accounting side, but you don't necessarily wanna do it, well, then you need to form the partnerships that you can turn to. And and, again, we for some of you who have been with us for a while, you know, we still do technically have our PlanGuru partnership program, and and and we occasionally do send out some leads that we source. But in, you know, in the back half of twenty twenty six, we're really gonna ramp that whole thing up. And the purpose of that is twofold. One is when our businesses need help, we can send a RFP out to all of you. But in turn, we wanna be a community for trusted business advisers to find complementary business advisers. So if you're that CFO and you need that, person you can turn to for ecommerce, you know, retail company, that can get their QuickBooks set up and get it talking to Shopify with all the different flavors of data the way we want it, well, then then you all of a sudden be able become able to sell. Okay? So many of your prospects aren't good candidates for these services because their back house back end house is not in order. You know? So like I said before, you know, if you don't if you if you don't have other employees to help you, we're here for you. Okay? Get you know, go solo. But larger organizations do need someone to be, you know, responsible for driving sales across the organization. We had too many large accounting firms. It's too compartmentalized, and, you know, everyone has their own clients, and there's not enough cross synergy. Whereas a lot of these newer companies are a lot of these newer accounting technology firms are growing up in a way where fractional CFO is being systematically pitched on a regular basis to every single tax customer, and that's where you need to get to. As I said before, you can partner with us as well. You know, we charge you a fraction of what we charge, directly. And yeah, couple more couple other final things to think about before I kick it. I'm gonna do one more poll question here. How much revenue does your typical customer or you? Okay. So if you're a business adviser, how much revenue does your typical customer generate annually? Alright. You know, again, do me a favor. Just if you could vote in the poll question even if you don't need the CPE, just, again, if you're not if you're not comfortable sharing some of the stuff, just you can lie. You know? But that way, if I can close the poll earlier, that's great. We're only at fifty three percent participated. I'm going to close the poll in five, four, three, two, one. Sorry, folks. I got my other screen over here. Okay. When it comes to delivery, you know, questions you need to ask yourself. What will you do on the front side of the paywall? You know, too too many folks, never do this because they you know, it's like a chicken and egg thing. You know? They, you know, wanna get the client to sign up for a fee, and I get it. You don't wanna do work for free, but you gotta get started somewhere. You know? And if and and a lot and the problem with a lot of your clients is that they they've never participated in a regular budgeting forecasting cadence. They don't they don't get it. They don't they don't see the value. So if you can get it set up again, I'm not some multi departmental company maybe set up one of their departments. Right? You're not gonna you're not gonna build out seven departments for somebody for free. But a single QuickBooks class user or maybe you pick the biggest department for your big client, and if you want to get with one of us, just run the import and let them live that first meeting. You know? You build the budget in December. At the end of it in the in the second week of February, show them their budget versus actuals. Show them their updated forecast. Take them down the p and l and the forecast. Take them down the balance sheet and the forecast. Spin the forecast with them. You can never there is no substitute for experiencing this cadence on a regular basis. So, I mean, once you get good at it and you got a whole bunch of customers and you can provide a whole bunch of referrals, well, then you can say, listen, buddy. You know, pay me up front. That's, you know, that's how this is gonna work, you know, because you've got because you got the business. But, again, I find a lot of, you know, folks that are dipping their toe in the water. They want you know, the they they want this to they sort of guaranteed profitable engagement from from the jump. And whether whether you're new to offering the service or whether you used to do it in Excel and you're just new to PlanGuru, I feel like it's worth it to invest some money in your in yourself and that relationship. And and my pledge to you in this is if you're working for free on it, I will help you for free. Okay? So, you know, if you need some help from myself and Tom, I need, you know, something built real quick. Again, I'm not I'm not offering to, do twenty hours of work for free for something. But if you got a if you got a new prospect and you're busy, but you think that prospect's gonna be a good case, let's get together. We'll work as a team to get it done. And if you're working for free, I'll work for free. Beyond that first beyond that, like, getting, you know, the engagements flowing and deciding whether or not you're gonna charge an upfront fee or whether you're gonna maybe get give them a month of service for free so they can get a flavor for it. Once you once you've established your business, you have a question of, are you do you charge a setup fee? Like, I mean, obviously, a lot of for for a lot of clients, you might put twenty hours into the setup, but then by the time you get to month three, you're you're putting in two hours a month as long as there's no fire drills going on. You know? So it's this balance of, like, if it doesn't work out after two months, wow. I'm really gonna take a bath on this. You know, Adam from Summit CPA said you know, he's always told me avoid impostor syndrome. Like, you you know, I jokingly say avoid impostor syndrome unless you don't feel comfortable in the beginning. You know? Like, you wanna, you know, ask for the upfront fee. You're worth it. You deserve it. That's where you're spending a lot of time. Share the risk. Like, if the client cuts out after two months, you don't wanna take a bath on that. However, you know, I would argue that by not charging an upfront fee, you could potentially make a lot more money in the long term because you charge a slightly higher monthly fee, and and that monthly fee stays fixed and it increases with inflation. And furthermore, right, your your so many of these potential prospects, as I said in the previous bullet point, so many of these potential prospects are new to this. They they've never sat in a budget meeting where you compare the budget to the actuals, hold a manager accountable, kick the manager out, and then respin the forecast. And so when you've never lived that experience, it's hard to see the value. So if you say to the client, listen. I'm gonna spend twenty hours building out this model, and I'm and I'm only gonna charge you fifteen hundred bucks a month going forward. Okay? I'm gonna charge you fifteen hundred bucks this month, next month, the month after, two thousand bucks again. Single QuickBooks class, small business, pretty simple. And and and and and you say to the client, like, if this doesn't work out, I'm willing to sign up to do all this work, and and I'm not gonna be making money until we get to the end of the year. Right? It's a compelling value proposition. You know? Again, it's not such a fun value proposition if the client burns you. And because the client doesn't put in the effort, it doesn't work. But I'd also say that's the doubles that's the double edged sword. You can make this promise to your client. Hey. I'm gonna set this up for you, and I'll give you two months for free. Or I'm not I'm sorry. I'm gonna charge you, fifteen hundred bucks a month, you know, for month one all the way through. I'm gonna do a ton of the work up front. And and, again, if it doesn't work out, I'm the one that loses. Sorry. I kinda lost my train of thought there. I'll I'll move on to the next point. But, you know, so if you can, you know, you can give the client one fixed fee for everything. Again, that's gonna enable you to achieve sort of the best value pricing. If you can replace what the traditional accounting firm was doing when they weren't using any good tech and weren't asking their clients what their actual needs were. If you can opt automate that, do that for a lot less, bolt on the fractional CFO, only charge them a little bit more than they were paying before, well, you're gonna have a really compelling offer. You know, I mentioned Adam Hale before from Anders, formerly Summit CPA, now Anders CFO. You know, they they're you know, as, unless somebody wants to correct me, I'd say they're really, preeminent, one stop shop, you know, in terms of them, doing everything and the scale that they've reached and the size. You know? And they have, you know, pretty clear and transparent pricing on their website, but it's all it's all flexible. So so yeah. Let's do one more poll question so Dan doesn't have to worry about them as much. Okay. So, yeah, what percentage of your clients build a budget and do monthly reviews currently currently? I'm gonna end the poll in five four three two one. So I I kinda remember what, you know, what I was thinking when I lost my train of thought. But, you know, once you get to a steady state, again, you don't wanna do you don't wanna do two, three months free. That seems, you know, desperate. Right? Like, you only do two, three months free when you're new to this and you're new to PlanGuru, and you just wanna get your feet wet. However, when you're selling a service that your client really doesn't understand and that the only way for them to understand it is to do it, You'd you know? Yeah. You're gonna be able to get some people to pay you for setup. You're gonna get some people to pay you for implementation, but there's gonna be a lot of people who aren't gonna pay a big upfront fee for something they don't understand. You know? So making that value proposition of I'm gonna put in all this time, and if it doesn't work out, I lose, is sometimes a requirement to get a certain type of business. And, again, it's the same type of business that's it's gonna be a simpler business. It's gonna be a smaller business where your time commitment's not gonna be extraordinary should it not work out. Okay. And I I am gonna just before I kick it to Dan, because we always do this. Okay? The first case study is the simplest thing you could ever imagine. It's just create a new PlanGuru scenario. You you can create it with don't create a whole new company for this, unless you don't have any companies yet. You can always delete it. But just go into an existing company, add a new scenario with five years, first three years by month, add fifteen accounts to the income statement, different account types, add ten accounts to the balance sheet. When you add a revenue account, simply manually enter a value, which we're gonna touch upon by the end of today, copy it off to the right, go to the balance sheet, see what that did. Go to the statement of cash flows, see what that did. Go add your next account. You know, go add a depreciate go add a depreciation account and link it to and then go create a accumulated depreciation account and link the two. Okay? Again, maybe that maybe that's a little too advanced for this challenge. But the point is by adding these accounts one by one, putting some balances in it, and then toggling in between the different financial statements, it's a, you know, it's a great way to really understand the most basic mechanics of our three financial statement integrated model. I do want you to add one basic variable on the assumptions and KPIs tab. So go to your assumptions and KPIs tab and add, like, a unit sold. And then I do want you to link just one attempt. Well, I don't think we're gonna get we're not gonna get into assumptions and KPIs yet. So I do, we do have a video tutorial on how to use that method. So I do for most of the other accounts, you can just do manual entry. For a cost account, you can just make it a percentage of revenue. But, again, it's the most I don't even care about you using the forecasting method so much as just understanding the most basic mechanics of the PlanGuru model. Okay. I'm gonna go off cam here, and, kick it to my colleague, Dan Elise, who's going to, take you through the the first portions of, you know, setting up your PlanGuru company and model. And I will stop my share. Yes. Thank you, Christian. I'll go ahead and share my screen. And everything Christian just described is gonna make a lot more sense for the folks that have have never done those things before here in a moment because we're gonna take, everything, all those slides that PlanG, that Christian just went through and apply them in practice here. Right? We're gonna start building out a real life model within the software. So, if everybody could see my screen okay, should be the login screen. This is how we're accessing accessing PlanGuru. App dot PlayingGuru dot com is the URL. And I'm gonna go ahead and log in to my tutorial account here. And the first thing you see is the home screen. Right? This is a home base. This is where you're selecting which company files you'd like to work on, as well as adjusting things like your profile and preferences. Real quick, we're gonna touch on this. We're gonna come back to it later, when we, you know, focus more on collaboration. But this is an area where you can adjust, you know, your profile name, your email, your password. You can adjust the plan that you're on, as well as adding users. So I'm currently on an adviser plan. We also have a direct to business plan. They work very similarly, except in the adviser plan, you can add what are called adviser users. So that's folks within your firm that you're working on models with as well as client users. Obviously, the clients you wanna give this access to, and each client will have access to their respective company, not the others. Right? And you can set permissions. Internal users are free. Like, obviously, there's additional charges for company users. Yes. Yes. So to clarify, Advisor users, as long as they share the same email domain as you, you can add as many as you'd like at no cost. Client users, there comes with, you know, each company comes with one, but you can add additional client users for an additional charge. And like I said, we'll come back to that later. So right here represents the list of my client companies. Right? Now, if you were using this, you know, direct to business internally, right, you would just have one company there. Right? You don't need to have multiple companies, that you're working on. But as an adviser, I can select any one of these and see the files that I've created. Right? So this expands. The next layer is called a project, and we're gonna walk through a brand new one here in a moment. And then the final layer is either a business unit or a scenario. Right? So this franchise fast food sample company here, we have three separate locations that we're budgeting for, forecasting for, reporting for, all at the location level, as well as the consolidation level. Right? We're able to consolidate those and roll those up. We could do multiple tiers of consolidations. So if you had, you know, a parent company with subsidiaries and those subsidiaries had departments that you wanted to budget for individually. Well, we can add a third layer here. There can be multiple levels of consolidations. We're gonna cover that more in class two, or is that beginning of class three, I believe. But to show you the ex difference between what we call a consolidation project, which is what I just showed you, and there's another example right here, departments rolling up to a consolidation. There's also a single entity project where you could have multiple scenarios instead of business units. So base case, high case, low case. You know, you start with the base case, plug in all the numbers you feel like are most likely to happen, and duplicate it for a more aggressive approach where you're tweaking the numbers higher or a more conservative approach, you know, for a low case there. So we're gonna start, you know, from scratch here. Just to Notice Oh. Okay. Yeah. Go go ahead, Dan. I'll weigh in. Yeah. I was you you're probably about to bring this up too. This button right here, this is what we're gonna focus on in class three. This is the brand new reporting and dashboarding, AI powered reporting and dashboarding feature we've recently added powered by Reach reporting. You know, if you're just trying to get right to the reports after you log in, you can click that button. Second tab appears. It'll bring you straight to the reports. What we're about to go through is the modeling side of things. So actually building out the dataset, right, the budget, the historical data, the rolling forecast that the analytics tool will eventually feed off of. So we're gonna create a company here. Click this big green button there. And we're gonna name this. This is off a, you know, fictional QuickBooks company file of a bike shop, so I'm just gonna call this Dan's Bikes here. So you're giving the company a name. Entity type, you know, most of the time, it's gonna be corporation, limited liability. But if you're a nonprofit partnership, you could choose a different entity type there. The most important selection that you're making on this screen is this first month of the fiscal year drop down. Right? What's the first month of your fiscal year? If it's just a regular calendar year, right, you're just gonna stick with January. But, you know, if it's a nonprofit, retail company, whatever it might be, you can choose whatever company you'd like there. That's important because all of the files underneath this company that you're creating will inherit that setting. Right? And that cannot be changed after the fact. So that's the most important piece there. Country, state, ZIP code, I think it does make you do a ZIP code, so we'll just go with that. And the other two options here, you do not need to address right away, something like edit pro payroll taxes. You could always come back to this later. This is allowing you to eventually break down payroll and payroll related expenses, you know, by employee, incorporating different federal and state payroll taxes, including wage limits. And just to give you a little taste of this, when you click that, a table appears. It starts out as blank, but you can add taxes where you can name the tax, select whether it's federal states, select your state, tax rate, tax cap, and save those rates to that table, which you can then eventually, reference later. We're gonna be doing an entire breakdown of the payroll and payroll related expenses in an assumptions tab, I believe in class two, towards the end of class two. So we're gonna go through that in detail. And then last but not least, before we click submit here, company subject to that GST value added tax. You know, the the that's for our friends, you know, overseas in the UK, Australia, you know, also Canada. Any company that's, you know, requires value add, tax tax calculations, you can choose both the accrual or cash method and add some rates associated with VAT as well. But, you know, if you're US based, you won't need to worry about that. You can leave that unchecked. We go ahead and click submit there. Alright. Now it creates the company. Now it's asking us to create our first project. Think of a project within PlanGuru as essentially a file folder. Right? A file folder that houses all the different budgets and forecasts that you're creating. You might also create different projects for different exercises. Like Christian mentioned, you know, in one of his beginning slides, you have the budget that you're creating at the beginning of the year. It's the targets that you hope to achieve if everything goes to plan, and you can have a detailed operating budget, you know, by checking that box. And you notice when I check that box, it starts to give me a name here. Right? But then you also have, you know, forecast if you wanna attach a rolling forecast, you know, beyond the first year budget and you wanna forecast out two or three years by month. You could see where you're gonna be at, you know, from a cash flow perspective based on your, you know, sales goals. You could do that as well. And you could also check the box for a strategic plan. So you can have all three exercises within a single file. Like Christian said, you can go out to ten years and, you know, use that first year as the basis to building out your budget and forecast, or you can have separate projects. If you want to create a detailed monthly breakdown, operating budget, and rolling forecast that goes out three years, completely separate from a separate, you know, project that's going out ten years and not broken up by months, this annual amount's ten years, and you're using some high level growth rates and historical trends to come up with that strategic plan, that can be two separate projects. Right? So for this example, we'll just do a budget slash forecast here. I will change the date because we're in twenty twenty six. The next thing you wanna address here is this question on the right. How is your company structured? Like I mentioned, there is a single entity project. We're budgeting at a top level, one set of financials, one income statement, one balance sheet, one cash flow, but then you can have multiple scenarios. Right? And then you have consolidation of multiple departments slash divisions. We really call these business units because it could be a location. It could be a subsidiary, you know, different entities that you're rolling up. You have the have that ability as well. So, you know, this will designate whether this project has the ability to do consolidations or not. We're gonna keep it simple here today and stick with single entity. Project name, you can change it to whatever you want, you know, based on what you're checking up here. It's gonna give you a default name. And you'll see these little tool tips, you know, if you're interested in seeing, you know, what these represents and, you know, by making this selection, what happens on the next next screen, stuff like that. This is all coming from our in house virtual tour guide that you could access on the bottom right hand side here. There's a little bit of a button here where you can ask some questions. This is AI powered, so this will search through our knowledge base and produce answers based on what you're trying to do, which is really useful. And then lastly here is whether or not you're gonna be using account numbers. So, you know, if you're using QuickBooks, what does your account string look like? Is it four digits, five digits, any dashes, periods? You know, if you're using an accounting system, that's more robust and you are doing this for multiple business units, maybe it's something like NetSuite or Sage Intact, and you have department codes and company codes and project codes in that account number. Right? This is where you're defining that. And it's super important for consolidation purposes because notice when I say yes, it asked me to enter my account mask, and it gives me a legend of letters down here. Right? So a is the natural account portion, s is subsidiary or company code, b represents department code, and o is pretty much the catchall for all others with some examples down below. So simple account number, just a natural account, four a's. Here's one with a five digit natural account and a three digit department code. So that's five a's and three d's. Right? And you can, you know, go farther than this. Right? If I had, you know, five digit natural account, three digit department code, you know, two digit company code, and then, you know, maybe a three digit project code. It could look something like that. Those are pretty rare, few and far between. We're gonna keep it simple here today and just go with a four digit natural account number here. So four a's is what we're gonna stick with. Now, if you're not using account numbers, no worries. You could just select no there. Right? And PlanGuru is gonna import data based on your account descriptions, and you could also do consolidations based on your account descriptions instead. So we're gonna click submit. Alright. So now that we've added the company, and we've also added our first project to that company, it's asking us to add our first scenario to that project. The default name is called base case. Again, you can change that to whatever you'd like. You know, twenty twenty six budget slash forecast financial plan. You know, those are, you know, some common names that we see. So this is what I was gonna say earlier, but I decided this would be a better place to say it. I and then I and I might even you know, we wanna give people the right cues here so that it makes it obvious. Like, you know, I think the best thing to title your you know, if you are in in the most likely situation, you're going to be working with a business where you're gonna be comparing budget to actuals each month, and then you're reforecasting. And you're gonna spend most of the time in that model. I like to call it current forecast. K? Now the obviously, if you have multiple departments, it's location one or whatever. Obviously, if you're actually doing a base case, high case, low case for the bank, then call it base case. But the most probable situation is you're just sitting down there getting ready to do all the things we talked about earlier, because that you can compare the budget to the actuals, you can reforecast. If you call it current forecast, that's gonna typically be the scenario you're always in. Now most of these smaller business situations, you don't have a board that's ever gonna say, wait a minute, Dan. What did you say that what was that forecast you gave us in the last board meeting? I wanna see that again. Like, you know, in real life, when it's just you and the business owner and all you care about is making good decisions, you don't even need to save old forecasts. Okay? But if there is a situation where there's a board or a bank or investors that you're showing the forecast to and you may be asked to one day revisit said forecast, then you can save off different iterations like January forecast, March forecast, again, sort of after the fact as you keep it rolling. So, again, in the normal predicament, we're not doing multilocational, are we, though, on this one? No. No. I was just gonna Yeah. I was gonna take it a step further because I completely agree, and I'm glad you brought that up. I you know, you could even add some dates in here. And the reason why I do that, you know, said, we'll do today's date. You know, when we're eventually pulling this data over to our, analytics tool, it's actually really important that, you know, these these scenarios and business units have very unique names. When that data is pulling over, it's pulling everything over for the company. So if you have multiple projects, and in one project, you've created a a a scenario called base case, and then you created a brand new one and also called it base case, you know, know, you're gonna have two scenarios on the analytics side to choose from in a drop down that both say base case. Right? And you can pretty much figure out which one they are by selecting them and see what the numbers are when they appear. But, you know, it'll be much easier on yourself to identify, you know, what is what by giving them unique names as much as possible. So we'll stick with current forecast here. Budget year. This is the year that we're starting our budgeting and forecasting process. That's gonna default to a current, you know, date here, twenty twenty six. How many years would you like to project? So based on the option I chose, check that box for forecast. It's gonna default to three years, but you can change this. If you wanna do a five year plan, ten year plan, you just make that adjustment here. And then break down projected years by month through. Right? So by selecting three, it defaults to all three of those years be broken being broken up by month. But say I just wanted to do the first year broken up by month and have twenty twenty seven and twenty eight just be annual amounts, I don't need to see the monthly detail there. I can select twenty twenty six, and it'll give me a little note there saying, you know, some of those years will behave differently, right, since we're crossing from a monthly to an annual calculation. Right? So it gives you a little heads up there. I usually like to keep it, you know, consistent and break down all the years by month here. Now, if you did choose something, anything beyond three years, four, five, all the way through ten, it will also show you that the most you can break down by month is three years. Right? And I'll give you that that message as well. That is, you know, a foundational setting within PlanGuru. That's how we designed it. We don't get a ton of requests for four, five, all the way ten you know, out to ten years broken up by month. So the max that you can break down those projected years by month is through three years. In this case, year four and year five will just be annual amounts. We're gonna stick with three there. Forecast month. So based on the budget year and where we are at within that year, where do we wanna start our projections? Right? You could just start with January if you wanna create a full year by month budget and forecast. Right? There's no harm in doing that. But say we're sitting here in May, and you have your books closed through April, you can select May as your forecast month. What that means is that actuals will appear through April, and you're starting your projection process from May on. Right? And that's a one way street. Right? So if you select May here, we can't turn it back to January. Right? So that's a decision you're making up front saying, okay. I'm done with January through April. I don't need to do any budget versus actual comparisons for those those years. I wanna start this in the current month and do all that stuff going forward. Right? If you have an idea that you want to, you know, have the ability to do a full year budget versus actual comparison, go back to those, you know, beginning months in the year and report on them and, you know, have some budgeted numbers to reference, then stick with January. Stick with that first month of your fiscal year. Right? Because you can always move it forward. You can't move it back. So we're gonna stick with January in this case. Hey. When you are sitting, like, if you are like, specifically this time of year, okay, you actually have a client that you built a budget for last year. Like, you know, there there is an existing budget, or maybe they came up with their own internal budget that wasn't in PlanGuru. Obviously, if you're using PlanGuru, they might have a budget, then you won't have this problem. But let's say you've got a new PlanGuru client and there is some form of existing budget. Well, even though you're starting in May or something. Yeah. You still set your forecast month up for January. We can then import that budget via Excel, archive the budget, which we'll show you later, and then you roll it forward. Okay? That's really important. We should even have, like, a notification on the screen almost. Like because a lot of people, they they set it up for a May forecast month, and then they and then they go in and build a bunch of stuff, and then they go, well, how do I get my budget in here? Well, that ship has sailed. Right? Yeah. So anytime you come here with a preexisting budget, set it for January, load the budget, and then roll it forward. Yeah. That's that's a somewhat common exercise we see, and you'll see how that works once we go through the Excel import process today of how, you know, if you do have a budget, whether it's in QuickBooks or Excel, you know, we can format it correctly and import that, lock it down, and then then you could start using all of PlanGuru's tools to make adjustments to those numbers and, you know, reforecast going forward. Then lastly, up at the top right, this is referencing historical data. By default, it's three years' worth of historical data. So set to twenty twenty three, it's gonna bring in twenty three, twenty four, and twenty five. You can bring it up to five years' worth of historical data. And all five of those can be broken up by month if you'd like. If you just wanna bring in annual amounts, you say none. Right? It's just gonna be five columns, all annual amounts for those years. We'll stick with three. Break it up by month. Alright. So once you like everything here, submit. And based on all those settings, it's gonna start putting together the framework of your model, that we can then start populating. So this window is the first thing that appears. Gives you a option to either import your unique chart of accounts and historical data via our, integrations or manually add data. I'm gonna be doing a QuickBooks import here in a moment, but I wanna at least show you how to manually add data. So maybe you're a business adviser and you're working with a start up. They don't even have an accounting system in place yet, and they're building, you know, a business plan to go take to the bank or some investors to, you know, get some funding, get their idea off the ground, you can add accounts to these sections manually. So if I click manually manually add data, you can go to, say, the revenue section here, right click, add account. So that's here adding lines in here. Right click, add account. You can give it a name, give it a account number, select a projection method for it. We'll be going over those later. Click add, and that will add it to that section. And you could do that, you know, as many times as you need to start building out all of your revenue accounts, operating expenses, eventually move over to the balance sheet, and the cash flow will automatically generate for you. Another common use case of manually adding an account is, you know, say, you imported a chart of accounts and, you know, there is multiple revenue streams, but in the revenue section, there is only one account that says sales. Or there's only one account that says accounts receivable. Right? But there's multiple buckets of AR based on different terms, collection terms. Right? You're able to add additional accounts in here that live separately from what you're doing in QuickBooks, but their purpose their their purpose is for forecasting. Right? So you can get more granular with your budgeting and forecasting, have a more detailed chart of accounts in PlanGuru than you do in QuickBooks by adding accounts in here manually. And we'll probably do some examples of that in class too. Delete this one, no? Right click deletes. Alright. So, to import from QuickBooks, we're gonna expand this left side menu bar here, select imports, financial statements. These are import options. We're just gonna do QuickBooks and Excel today. Xero works the same exact way as QuickBooks. So same steps that you're seeing for QuickBooks can be done by, you know, clicking connect to zero and connecting to zero as well. So when you connect to QuickBooks or click that button, this is the first thing you'll see. First question is, will your PlanGuru company be connected to a single QuickBooks company? Right? One to one connection. The default option is yes. But if you're in a situation where you're creating a, you know, consolidation of multiple QuickBooks company files, right, say for a parent company, and you eventually wanna consolidate those, PlanGuru has that ability. Right? We can connect to multiple QuickBooks company files by selecting no there. But we're gonna go with yes in this case. Do you wanna automatically refresh QuickBooks data daily? That's also defaulted to the to yes. So that means every single night, PlanGuru's automatically ping QuickBooks. So when you log into PlanGuru, you're looking at the most most up to date actual data. Right? So all the entries, you know, going back to what Christian said about bill dot com, those, you know, receipts that you're uploading, stuff like that, all that work that's done in QuickBooks, if you don't wanna manually import that every single day or, you know, however often you'd like, you can set it and forget it with that option there. Now if you do want more control, you know, some of our customers, like to wait until the books are closed every single month to bring in actuals and they want more control on when data's coming into PlanGuru, all you gotta do is switch that to no. But it is if it is switched to yes here, you could select your time zone on when that data's coming in every single night. We're gonna connect to QuickBooks. Once we're happy with our selections there, it's gonna have me log in. Type in your password. Nope. Alright. So if you are a business adviser, this is where your list of client companies you have access to would show up here. You'd select one of those companies, click next, And now, that connection is live. So the next screen you're gonna see is how you want this information imported into PlanGuru. We have the ability to apply filters. So if you are you're using classes, you're using locations, customer fields, things like projects and different customers. Right? Those can be applied here. You know, we're in this example, we're importing at a top level, so we're gonna leave this unchecked. We wanna bring in all data, you know, for all three financial statements, or actually income statement and balance sheet. But, you know, again, going back to that situation where you have a consolidation model and you wanna import by departments and you have those departments split out by class, you'd be able to select a specific class all from here, which lines up with the corresponding PlanGuru business unit. So we're gonna leave that unchecked. Accounting method, we're gonna stick with accrual. And then, we are gonna be importing both the income statement and balance sheet. If, you are in a situation where you're doing consolidation and you have those departments and you selected a class, meaning you just wanna import the income statement, you can choose that. Or at the consolidated level, right, if you import all those departments, roll them up into a consolidated income statement, and at that consolidated level is where you wanna bring in your balance sheet, where you can select that option right there. It will only bring in the balance sheet based on that selection. We're gonna bring in everything here, income statement and balance sheet. Run import. So you're gonna start seeing a loading screen. Import in progress. And eventually, this is going to take us to a mapping window where you'll see all of the accounts are gonna be automatically mapped based on the account types you've already established within QuickBooks. But it gives you a chance to remap if you feel like you need to. Playing Guru and QuickBooks do a good good job putting everything where it needs to go. But if do need to, you know, switch up a cost account and, you know, put it in the operating expenses or vice versa, You're able to do that on that screen or reorder accounts into the order you prefer. That's gonna be next up. It might be a good time for a poll question too while we're in here, Christian. Gotcha. How many employees work at your firm? Employees work at your firm. Okay. I'm gonna close the poll in five four three two one. That that's a strange bifurcation. Yeah. Yeah. Got them, heavy on both sides of the spectrum there. First interesting poll result in a while. Alright. So and those loading times you just saw are completely normal, and it does take a couple minutes to, load this up. So that's another reason why setting it to, have it automatically update overnight is, preferred so you don't have to, you know, run that manual import every day. I mean, that this is the initial setup and import, process. So, I mean, this is gonna take a lot longer than nightly refresh of the data. So just Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, nightly refresh of the data, you don't have to do anything. But even subsequent manual imports will load faster than the initial import that you're seeing here. So this is the mapping window. On the left hand side would be unmapped accounts. Notice that's blank. On the right hand side, we have some tabs at the top that represent the different sections of your balance sheet and income statement. And those are further broken down into subsections like current assets, property and equipments, other assets, And all of the accounts are mapped to those subsections based on the account type within QuickBooks. And each one of these lines shows the account number, the account description, the PlanGuru account type that they've been assigned, which you can change via this drop down if you need to, or you can unmap an account as well. There's a little x button here on the right hand side. Sometimes folks tell me it's you know, they have trouble seeing it, so let me know if you cannot. But if you hover over your mouse there, it'll it'll say on map. And like I said, you know, PlanGuru does a really good job putting everything where it needs to go with the correct account type. But for whatever reason, say you needed to, you know, move bike purchases down to operating expenses or something like that. Right? You click on map. It's not what I wanna do. Escape. So I guess there we go. So on map, shoots it over to the left hand side. It's as simple as clicking and dragging over, and it'll drop right down to the bottom there. There it is. Like, on map it again, and click and drag over to bring it right back. If you're doing this again, right, you've already imported, the initial import brought in your chart of accounts, data, you then realized something else needed to be remapped or you want to, you know, delete an account, you can do that. Right? After you import the accounts, you can right click delete. Those deleted accounts will show up in the unmapped section right here. And you can check this box to, you know, see those. A lot of times, you know, if there's a bunch of accounts that don't have activity within QuickBooks, maybe you gotta clean up the QuickBooks chart of accounts, you're not using those accounts anymore, you could just choose to unmap those on the initial import, or you can delete them later, and they'll just stay in that deleted section right there. There's also zero balance accounts that are automatically not coming in, but you can choose to map those. That means there's just been no activity in that accounts over the course of the historical range that you selected. Right? But if you feel like you need to budget for that account, there's going to be activity in it in in the future. It's just mapping it by clicking and dragging over. So this looks good to me. We're gonna click next here. Oh, before I click next. Couple special accounts in here, special line items. One of them is cash. So notice all of my cash and cash equivalents accounts by having this designation, this account type called cash. What's gonna happen here is cash is a special accounts that is automatically projected for you going forward. So all of these accounts are gonna get grouped into one line called cash and cash equivalents. If for whatever reason you wanna have more control on one of these accounts and you don't wanna include it in that overall cash projection, you can just change it to other current assets, and it'll show up like the rest of the other current assets. Otherwise, they're all grouped together. Same thing with retained earnings. That's also a special account within PlanGuru that automatically calculates for you based on your projected net income and previous month's retained earning balance. So anything with the retained earnings designation also gets grouped into a single account. If you want it separate, set it to capital. Alright. So once you've established the mapping, it gives you another window where it gives you a chance to reorder the accounts. You know, by default, it'll just be in the account number order, which is typically what most people like. But for whatever reason, you wanna, you know, move these up and down, you can reorder these. And this is usually the best place to do it, the initial imports. There is the ability to move accounts after the fact, but this is the easiest way to do it right here. And let's see. In the income statement, I I wanna move this one back up. Right? This is the one I remapped and went to the bottom. So let's move that back up based on the account number. So, again, that's just a click and drag. Do so. But everything looks good. Right? Order, the income statement, balance sheet, and we're gonna go ahead and click imports here. This also usually takes a minute or so to load, so good chance for another poll question. And if anybody has any questions based on anything they've seen from a setup and import process standpoint, this is a great time to type it into the q and a field or the chat field. K. I'm gonna close the poll in five four three two one. Okay. There you go, Dan. Alright. So as you could see, we now have a populated income statement as well as a balance sheet. Here we are. Notice what's happening in the balance sheet. We got some numbers in the balance sheet while in the income statement, we do not just yet. What's happening in the balance sheet is just taking our most recent historical balances and pushing them forward until we adjust them based on projection methods that we've selected. Right? So there's December twenty five. That's why you're seeing those same values going across as flat. And then back on the income statement, there's some historical data I've imported three years by month. This is some sample data, so it's it's not the best here. But what you could also do once you have your chart of accounts imported here is you can create account groupings. So basically, mimic the account structure you have within QuickBooks where you have sub accounts rolling up into parent accounts. So that's as simple as highlighting the accounts that you want to group together. This is a click and drag. And it could be, you know, as many counts as you want. And once you have them highlighted, you can right click. This window appears, and you give the group a name. You can even give it an account number if you wanted to. You don't have to, though. I'm gonna click create group. Two things are gonna happen. You're gonna see a header for the group as well as a total. Now, in order to create a group, the lines that you're grouping together need to be contiguous. Right? In line with each other. Meaning, I can't take this line and group it with this line. Right? Because they're not right next to each other. So I'd have to move this account up or this one down first and then create the group. But once the group is created, you can expand and collapse it. Collapsed, it will show the total. Expanded, you will see the detail. And you could do that on your income statement and your balance sheet. And like I mentioned, even after you've imported your chart of accounts that exist within QuickBooks, I can still come in here and add brand new accounts. Right? Say you wanna forecast a new revenue stream that doesn't even exist yet, but you wanna include it in your in your forecast model. Right? You can add accounts in here, you know, mess around with the projection methods for it. You know, if you like it, you keep it. If you don't, you delete it. And that's just a right click, add accounts. It looks like we might have a question here. For the training purposes, can I just make up the numbers if I don't want to link PlanGuru with an active client QBO? Absolutely. Absolutely. So you can kinda take the approach of just adding accounts manually or if you're, what we're about to show you, what Christian's about to hop into, is an Excel imports. So if you wanna put together a, you know, test, a test list of a chart of accounts that you wanna import via Excel because you don't wanna sit here and add them individually one by one, you could do that too, and you can totally make up those numbers for the, case study. I mean, we only you have QuickBooks files, we'd only recommend doing that under the most extreme circumstances. Like, you know, if you if you don't have QuickBooks files, I get it. But, anyway, I mean, it's just the QuickBooks import's gonna make your life a lot easier. I mean, obviously, sometimes people want a different structure, and, like, they wanna modify it tremendously from the standards. So, you know, in those circumstances, it might it might not make sense to use QuickBooks files, but, yeah, most of the time, you're make your life a lot easier. Go ahead. It is the fastest way to get data into PlanGuru for sure. It's the direct connection with QuickBooks. So with that said, a good segue to another way of getting data into PlanGuru. And we're gonna touch on this a little bit here. It's not only financials, but also assumptions you can import via Excel. But if you are using any other accounting system we do not integrate with directly, maybe industry specific accounting software, we can still bring in that data via Excel. So I'm gonna stop sharing here. Just as an aside here, folks, as I I'm gonna I'm gonna let's do, we're we're good on the time with the poll questions. But We are by the next time we reconvene PlanGuru University, we we will have a Google Sheets integration as well. K? We're gonna continue to support our Excel import, but Google Sheets is the most connected software on the planet. And what it enables us to do is to API into thousands of systems in the middle of the night and arrange the data exactly as we want it for import into PlanGuru. You know? So this can, you know, help in two ways. Right? One, is, to, again, just get, you know, obviously, financial statements. Right? Like, a lot of accounting niche industry specific accounting systems, things like that. You know, we do plan on developing direct connectors, Sage Intacct and HubSpot or sorry, Sage Intacct and NetSuite. But the the the Google Sheets integration is gonna be able to to connect everything in the interim. But it but it's also gonna be able to connect to nonfinancial data, like, data from Salesforce, data from HubSpot, data from other types of of, you know, business systems that we can get into PlanGuru. So we're really excited about that. You know, it's gonna be pretty transformational and, you know, getting data from all types of systems updated in the middle of the night every night just like we can do for QuickBooks. So, I I'm just gonna quickly Probably worth mentioning too, Christian, what's right around the corner is a QuickBooks desktop integration too. Oh, yeah. I mean, I I was joking with someone earlier today. I'm like, the QuickBooks desktop, you know, is, like, my groundhog day. Because we we've been working on it forever, but there anytime something else you know, it always got kicked to the curb. Right? Like, anytime, you know, some something else would come up. But we are legitimately in testing for it now, so, that's gonna be really huge. Okay. I don't need to spend time on this. So I'm gonna demonstrate the I should have done this before. And So good. I got two I think I have two years of historical. Well, I'll just set it for three anyway. Okay. So, I'm gonna go ahead and run our our Excel import here. I have the Excel file that I'm gonna drag, in my Windows Explorer. I drag it, drag and drop, release it, and click upload. Once we click upload, we have two options here. For now, we sorry. For now, we only have one option. But in the future, after we've imported one time, we do have the quick import option if the format of what you're importing is the same as what you imported last time. So many of the aspects of this mapping process, we really only have to do once. Okay? So I am going to, you know, there's a there's a handful of ways to use this. Actually, let me just open up the file so you can see it. My You know, I gotta update my date formats in, in my spreadsheet here because Dan, do you know why my headers aren't showing here? And oh, yeah. Sorry. What did it do? Convert them to a numerical value? Yeah. It it always does that. It just it it takes whatever is in the Excel file and converts it to a a number format. So that's why you're seeing the numbers at the top there, but that really represents January, February, and so on. Yeah. So if you look at my Excel sheet here, we got January twenty four through, December twenty five. Okay? There's a few different ways to tag things up. The first thing we need oh, I didn't I didn't set this up. Shoot. I should have set this up with account numbers, shouldn't I have? No. It's okay. You could just tag the account name in the second column, and and this will show what it what it looks like without account account numbers since I already did account numbers anyway. Yeah. So So if you didn't have account numbers, you could do it this way. So we basically gotta take these blocks and assign them is essentially what it's telling us. So I take this I take account name. I drag and drop it to the top of the column with account names, and I'm oh, damn. What am I doing wrong? Why is it there we go. Sorry. You put in I was on mute. Yeah. You just gotta drop it in that blue cellar. Yep. I I don't demo this too much. I should've let Dan keep doing it. I'm a little rusty. So as again, I'll just unassign that. So we take the account name variable. We drag it to the top of the column with account names. We release it. I should have set this up for account numbers. If I did, I would drag the account number marker over here. But what I'm doing is I'm assigning these in twelve month blocks. So I'm grabbing January of twenty four. I'm dropping it here, and it's essentially tagging up the next twelve months. So two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. And then this column is then the oh, I've lost it already. I I like to put a spacer in between my columns. So one, two, three. So it's this one. Okay? So I basically tagged up these two twelve month blocks by just dropping the first month, the twelve month block in there. And, again, if I had a separator in between my two year columns, it would it would be a lot more logical. And, obviously, again, we gotta, I don't know. Dan, is there a preferred format that it won't reformat it into these numbers? Not that I know of. I believe it always does. That's why I like, my personal preference for the month format selector here is the one that you just selected. Yes. Discrete month or series of months because you don't have to worry about, you know, dropping the twelve month block on the correct column there. You know, this is where you can just do them all in one shot here. And you don't even actually have to check all of them. You can just go to the last go to the last, column or the last But I don't want the first year. I set this model up for three years, but I only have two years of data. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. So I I don't I can't select the first year. Yeah. So I've just selected the you know, I put I put the cursor over January of twenty four. And then since they're all twenty four consecutive months, I selected those next two. Again, in a normal circumstance, you'd be able to just click them all, but I, set this model up with an extra year of historical data. Oh. Okay? So once I There was another section there too. So, it said actual or forecast slash budget. So going back to the example that Christian mentioned where you already have a budget that you wanna import and it's in Excel, you'd be doing it the exact same way here. But instead of when you're tagging the columns for, you know, the the actual amount, you'd be selecting forecast slash budgets. So that means, you're telling PlanGuru that these number numbers are budgeted numbers, so put it in the budget dataset as opposed to the actual dataset. Sorry. I let me go back in there. I didn't mean to do that. Yeah. So discrete months do the discrete months again. Yeah. And you'll see it immediately when this pops up. Right? So you're checking the boxes, but you're also making a selection right here. The default selection is actual. Okay. That's probably what you're gonna be doing most often. But if you wanna import a budget, you're just making that selection right there. Sorry that I gotta do this again. Try, try clicking December twenty five. Just click December twenty five. See how they're all Ah. Okay. So there we go. You click the first one, you click the last one, everything in between will be checked. But that only works if, you know, you have the Excel file set up like we do, where the all the the columns are contiguous. Like, if you have a separator column between the years, that's not gonna work great. Right? So now what we have on the left hand side is every it's not just the accounts. It's every cell in that column that has a value. So for example's sake, I did this so that you see we have headers, we have totals, and then we have my actual accounts. The the actual account has the account name and then a dash and then the location. So I click on the first account. I hold shift. I click on the last account. I highlight the three actual sales accounts leaving behind the header, leaving behind the total. I go over on my right hand side. I go to the income section. I click I I, sorry. Right click. That's just the left click. So left click and drag it over. Okay? Grab my next set of sales accounts. Left click. Drag it over. Okay. Let's keep going here. I'm grabbing just my sales accounts, not the total. Yeah. This this is the big difference between the QuickBooks import and the Excel import. Right? The QuickBooks import, all this mapping that Christian is doing right now is automated, based on the account types you've already established in QuickBooks. When you're importing from Excel, you do have to do the mapping your first time. But the good news is once we're done with the mapping here, PlanGuru remembers it. So the next import that you run, as long as the account descriptions are the same or if you're using account numbers and those are the same, PlanGuru is gonna recognize them. And you don't have to do this mapping every single time. It's just bringing in a new, you know, column worth of of numbers for a new month as an example. Okay. You don't necessarily have to do, you know, the entire chart of accounts either since we got about ten minutes left. Okay. But Let's Just not going as as I hoped. I've kind of screwed these up a little bit. The user error. Okay. Let me just grab a few expense accounts, and it doesn't really matter from here. Now the other the other unfortunate thing about the Excel import is we don't know what the subclass is. Okay? So for example, something like depreciation, something like accounts receivable. Where's my balance sheet? Okay? For the PlanGuru relevant, account types, you know, you can select these as part of the import process. However, you know, once you get into the model, you can always change this on your ad change category tool. So I'm just gonna click next. Again, same deal with the, the QuickBooks import. We have the ability to, map these things, move them around, adjust where they're placed. Let's do another poll question here. Which accounting systems are you using or your clients using? Okay. I'm going to close the poll in five four three two one. Okay. So now you can see that our import has completed. Dan, what are you know, obviously, when we go back through an import and we drag and drop. There is one there the forecast month? Well, no. No. Tag tag the columns if you wanna show how, like, how the the mapping is retained based on the ones you already just imported. You could just go through a regular import. But if you wanted to show something else Well, I was talking about the forecast. Like, how do you what do you mean? Go through a regular import? Yeah. Like, I was gonna say if you wanted to show how the ones that you've already imported are already mapped on the second import. You don't have to do those again. All the ones that you'd haven't mapped will will still be in the unmap section. Oh, oh, you're talking about on the mapping screen? So once you well, let me get to so once you've set up your model and you're now importing actual results, You're typically only going to be importing data for the current month until you've closed the books, until you get to the next you know, if you're sitting here in, if you're in April, you're importing the latest April numbers as frequently as you need to, but you're just importing April. Okay? So in that event, we make the forecast month selection. Okay? And we say, okay. Every time I send you this Excel file, the account type is gonna be in in the first column. The sorry. The account description is gonna be in the second column, but the actual results for the forecast month will always be in the third column of this Excel sheet. So then, again, whether you update the numbers daily or whether you update the numbers weekly or monthly, when you're importing new data, you're gonna come back through. You're gonna line it up. You're gonna select forecast month. And then once we go in that way, that's when we have that sort of that quick import option available to us. K? If you do that forecast month selection, you can then literally just click the the quick import to bring the data in. So yeah. And all your mapping is retained. You know, all all your locational mapping is retained. So What else, Dan? We got five minutes left. Was there anything you needed to tee up for next class? I mean, next class, we're gonna be covering you know, once the information's in here, right, the foundation of the chart of accounts and historical data, we then switch gears and, you know, start to do the fun part, you know, actually applying projection methods to those accounts that we brought in. So we're gonna be going over those standard projection Why don't you just Do give them enough of the taste of the standard projections so that they can do case study number one. Give a a five minute bang through. Every single one of these methods has a full video. So Dan is gonna give you a much abbreviated summary of the of the primary methods. But if you need to learn more, we'll talk about it next week or there's a video. Go ahead, Dan. Yeah. So by default, all of your accounts at first are set to manual entry. That's why you're seeing these yellow cells going across here. Anytime there's a yellow cell, it means you can manually plug into it. Right? If it's a white cell like this, it means it's doing some sort of calculation. It's not manual entry. Right? Like this total one right there. I can add another one right here. But you can adjust the projection method that's applied to each account by right clicking on the account, selecting edit, or double clicking on the account. Both options bring up the same window. And you can see this window that appear shows you what account you're in at the moment, and it shows you what projection method is selected at the moment. Right now, it's manual entry. Right? And not only do I have the yellow cells in the sheet behind this window, but you're gonna see this grid a lot with these different projection methods that shows you the historical data you've imported for that account as well as your future months, which again are also yellow. And I can, you know, right click, copy that to the right if I want it to be the same thing every month or something like rent expense. There's different ways to apply manual entry. So instead of monthly amounts in this grid, I can allocate an annual amount instead, or I plug in the full year number, my full year target in that full year column. Based on this selection, it'll spread across the months, whether that's evenly or based on how it was broken down last year, or you can really dial it in by setting account specific seasonality, which means you can plug in some percentages for those months. And I'll break it down that way. And really these first four, we're gonna be covering this link to assumptions and KPIs in in detail in the next session, and that's where you can create custom calculations based on, you know, the drivers specific to the business and the industry, and we'll walk through some examples. But these first four are what I like to consider the standard quick and easy projection methods. Perfect for the case study. So obviously, entry, applying historical trends or averages to the historical data that you've imported. So you can do, like, a monthly average, and you just tell it how many months you wanna go back. It does the calculation for you. Growth rate, you can apply growth rate percentage, you know, year over year. So if you plug in a ten percent in January there, that means it's gonna look at January of last year and apply a ten percent to give you January of this year's number. And then percent of other accounts is typically used for cost accounts or another variable expense, wanna make a percentage of revenue. So if I wanna link up my bike purchases, cost of sales accounts to, you know, these two revenue accounts. I'll right click on that account, edit. I'll choose percent of other accounts. I'll first make the selection on what I want this account to be a percentage of. Check both those boxes. Right? Now it's connected. And then I choose a percentage. Right? And if I'm not sure what to choose, I could take a look at what it's been in the past. It'll show me the historical relationship between those accounts that I've just linked up. Show me historical percentages, and I can go with something similar. So maybe I wanna go with like thirty percent or something. When I click updates, you can see that forty five thousand is now thirty percent of the one fifty. Right? Because I connected to both of these numbers. So stick with those. Stick with those in the case studies first four here. And, you know, when we start discussing, you know, identifying revenue accounts and breaking things down like payroll or capital expenditures on the balance sheet or specific collection terms. Right? Those more detailed type stuff, we're gonna, you know, walk through some examples to get you as accurate as possible with your budgeting and forecasting VR assumptions and KPIs option. Looks like we're up two o'clock. Final poll question, and we'll call do we have to do seven or eight? Just seven. Right? We're done. Seven. Yep. Yeah. You did seven. Okay. Sweet. Alright, guys. Well, that's two o'clock right in the nose. So, do we have any unanswered anything in the chat? Or Nah. No questions. Hope everything made sense. Wonderful. Alright, everybody. We will, see you next week. And in the meantime, you know how to get ahold of us. So we'll talk to you soon. Enjoy the rest of your day, guys. Bye.

Okay. So welcome to the second class, PlanGuru University. We, gonna kick today off with a little bit of, sort of you know, obviously, at the beginning of last class, I talked about, you know, why we budget and why we forecast and why we do strategic planning. Today, I'm gonna kick things off with, you know, a discussion, a little bit more depth on things we need to consider as part of our budgeting process. I'm gonna try to maybe go through these slides a little bit faster than I did in the past so we can dedicate more time to to using PlanGuru. But so just to kick things off, you know, a couple things. We had the I I have this expression called peanut butter spread. Something that came from my days at IBM when we'd have a new project and but we wanna get some kind of numbers up and running, so we just peanut butter spread it. That means you get every you cover all the pieces of the bread. You you don't you don't have a big lump of peanut butter in one corner and no peanut butter in the other. But the point is you cover it so that anyone looking at it superficially, you know, it looks like it looks right. So, you know, I do you know, for those of you who are business advisers, you know, a lot of times there's, like, this chicken and egg, debate over I don't have a client yet, or I haven't had a client that's agreed to this yet. You know, sometimes I think that the the best way to just get started with somebody is to pull their numbers in, spend twenty minutes peanut butter spreading it, and then put something in front of the client just to get a conversation started. Right? And this could be a prospect or it could be a client that has already agreed. Either way, you know, it's it's that it's that quick, easy forecast where we are using almost entirely the turnkey methods that we're gonna be discussing today. And one other note I'll make here is, you know, a lot of you have just emerged from tax season. And I understand that in tax season, you're terribly busy, but you're also interacting with your clients a decent amount during tax season. So it's the best even though you're busy, even though you're crazy busy. It's also one of the best times a year to, prospect. You know? Like, you're getting someone's you know, you've you've already spent, you know, tens, if not hundreds of hours or whatever it is, you know, preparing or maybe less, obviously, for a lot of your clients, but you spent a you spent a lot of time preparing the tax return. Spend an extra half an hour to spin up forecast model. And then, you know, when you put it in front of them and they get excited and go, wait. How much money do you think I'm gonna make next year? You know, you go, well, hold on. We haven't all I did was a, you know, a high level peanut butter spread model here. What we really need to do is go line by line down your p and l and balance sheet and really come up with a game plan for the next twelve months, you know, or the next year. So yeah. So, just to, like, a little bit of advice, like, it doesn't it does not take long to get something to just start a conversation. Right? So, you know, just to talk in terms of timing. Right? Like, how do these processes generally work? Well, again, I I'm isolating strategic planning from this because I'm really focusing on what is that monthly cadence that changes decision making. Right? And it's that monthly cadence that you can drive. It's that monthly cadence that all big organizations live by, but that so many small and a lot of medium sized businesses completely neglect. You know? So we set out at the beginning of the year, we build a budget. It sets the direction for what we wanna achieve. It's it's a moment to make big decisions about whether or not we're headed in the right direction or not. Okay? Hopefully, during the budget setting process, we can unlock some ways to improve. Like, I mean, obviously, your customers aren't wasting money for no reason. However, if you are a business adviser that has lots of clients that are saving money or wasting money in lots of different ways, you will have a much broader perspective than your client. So when you've you know, in those first couple years when you take the time to go down every account and not just say what happened in this account, but, hey. Well, do we need to keep spending that next year? Or or if we invested a little bit more in this, would we get a better ROI than other things? Right? So during the budget building process, hopefully, you find some ways to improve. However, real improvement is driven with targets, with incentives that can drive improved sales or better expense cost control. So it's not about, like, some epiphany where you're gonna be like, oh my gosh. We've been wasting all this money. It's because now all of a sudden, that business owner has three different managers that are every day making decisions that affect the bottom line. When they know that there's going to be a once a month meeting where we compare the budget to the actuals and respin the forecast, you know, it fundamentally changes behavior. You know, just the scrutiny of it changes behavior. It causes people to pay, you know, more attention to what they're doing. Obviously, once we set targets, we need to review performance against those targets. Right? Budget to actuals, hold team accountable, reward performance, question past decisions. You know, when you sit down and say, okay. This is what I think is gonna happen, and then the month plays out and you come back around and say, okay. What happened? You're gonna stir up all types of conversations and discussions that otherwise would not have happened, unlocking endless opportunities for you to come in and try to help them improve the way they're operating their business. And then finally, after we've done a postmortem on how we've done against our targets, after we've talked, to a couple team members and get a sense of where we really stand, we are going to do the rolling forecast. Right? And a rolling forecast is that tactical practical tool for making decisions. Right? Piece of equipment breaks down. We can buy a slightly used piece of equipment for fifty thousand bucks, but we gotta pay fifty thousand dollars cash, and we have to have it ready by tomorrow. Or we can lease a new piece of equipment from the manufacturer for a total cost of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars, but we get to pay it off over the next five years. Right? Obviously, you know, you'd like to be able to cut the check and get the piece of equipment that's gonna work for, you know, fraction of the cost, but will you be able to meet payroll? Or or so, you know, when you have this model and and you get together once a month, and at the beginning of the month, you've respawned the forecast based on the status quo. When all of a sudden the status quo changes, you've got this tool for analyzing whether or not we can afford to cut a a fifty thousand dollar check and still make payroll at the end of the right? So, in a perfect world in a perfect world, we start with a strategic planning process. Right? And the strategic planning process is where we get together with all of the stakeholders, the management and the owners. And we talk about what's working, what's what's not working, where you know, what's the goal here? Do we wanna return profits to shareholders, or do we wanna reinvest those profits for an exit in a few years? Okay? These are types of discussions that are not supposed to be had once a month. Right? They're conversations that we need to have maybe once a year or once every six months. And once we've set that, like, long term vision, that five year strategic plan, well, then we back into a budget. Now sometimes that's the same PlanGuru model. Right? If you're working with a one million dollar single QuickBooks class company, when you're done with that strategic planning process, you know what? Your budget's probably done for the next year. However, some large organizations do their strategic planning at the total company level, but they might have a detailed operating budget class by class by class. So in that event, what we need to do is we need to build a bottoms up buildup to solve to a budget that very much resembles that first year of the strategic plan. So strategic planning process makes a whole bunch of big decisions about where the business is going, but it also sets a series of general guidelines that we are going to adhere to in the budgeting process. And my color sorry. This should be orange. I don't know what's wrong with my graphics. Budgeting process should be orange because it corresponds to this. Then once a month, we get together, review performance. Now with PlanGuru Analytics, you or your client can log in every morning and see updated dashboards. Right? So we wanna provide you know, a lot of we're gonna talk about this next class, but you might have two different performance scorecards for every employee. One is that mid month scorecard that is focused exclusively on accounts and activity that we know is generally accurate mid month. And then we have a much larger end of month complete deep dive, where once the books are closed and we know everything is accurate. Okay? So whether it's checking in that percent attainment of budget mid month scorecard every morning or whether it's that but that should be going on anyway. But then there's that once a month, at least once a month. Okay. This is how we did. This is what worked. This is what didn't work. And then after that conversation, we respin the forecast once again. So I I call this the repeating cycle of success. Now let me let's do a poll question here. Hey, Dan. I I didn't even say hi to you. Are you there? I'm here. Hello, everybody. Sorry. That was rude of me. No worries. How so this is sort of, you know, whether whether or not you're internal or whether you're, a business advisory firm. You know, how many members of your team are you going to involve in using PlanGuru? I don't know what's up with that I don't know what's up with that first poll question, Dan. It's just me on it seems like option one and okay. Oh, the first answer? One is one is I'm just a one person shop. Yeah. I mean, numb the second one is number one is just me. Yeah. Yeah. No. The second one is it's only one person. I do have a team, but they're not gonna be involved in this. And then the other ones are self explanatory. Sorry. I am going to close the poll in five four three two one. Okay. So a budget is a comprehensive goals of what the business hopes to achieve. They should be aspirational yet achievable. Right? This, as far as the budgeting process goes, is the hardest thing. Right? We wanna set targets that are, you know, just within reach or just outside of reach of our team. Right? Either way, it kinda works out pretty well. However, you know, if our targets are too easy or too hard and we don't have systems in place to accommodate for that, then the budgeting process can actually become counterproductive. And, you know, and a lot of businesses say, oh, yeah. I budget. And then you go, well, tell me about that. And they say, well, once a year, the bank says I gotta put together a budget if I wanna keep my line of credit open. So I put together a budget. And then you go, well, is that it? And I go, yeah. So that's not, you know, that's not the end. That's just the beginning. You know? And that's one of the most common misconceptions you'll find of a lot of the prospects out there. I I already hit on this point in the last slide. But, again, that constant exercise of getting people to go on record of what they think is gonna happen and what they're gonna do differently over the next thirty days to change the outcomes in a positive manner and then getting together again the next month and getting it together again the next month and holding those people accountable. I mean, again, it's it's you know? Sorry. I don't wanna dig I don't wanna get too far off topic here, but, you know, a lot of know, very commonly, we get asked all these questions about AI, you know, and the role that plays and and and everything we're doing here. And AI just makes it easier for us to get the data organized in the way we need it organized and analyze the data without having to put in as much time because the AI can analyze it and give us some high level points, and then we can drill down deeper on the things we need to drill down on. But at the end of the day, it is about human interactions. It is about forcing those discussions that are going to change human beings' behaviors day in, day out. And, again so, you know, there's no the business advisers who are offering these skills, you know, there's no there's no complete supplanting of us. Right? Like, it's it's silly. You know? I do get people thinking that, you know, they don't that that AI is gonna make everything work perfectly without sort of human managing anything. But no. The AI gets us to real human discussions that change people's behaviors on day in, day out basis. You know, I will say that there is a general reluctance to get more people involved in this process. You know, when you when you get into that, let's say, five to fifteen million dollar revenue range, I work with a lot of business advisers who, it's just them and the owner. And, yeah, they've got a sales manager who's making all types of pricing decisions and hiring and firing and and, scheduling decisions, but, but they don't have a dashboard every morning. You know? And, because this is like you know, we wanna keep this in the c suite. Right? Now there are certain aspects of this process you need to keep in the c suite, like, you kick everyone out of the room and break out the forecast. Right? Like, the sales manager doesn't necessarily need to know what your forecast is. Sales manager only needs to know what where how high is that brass ring. Right? Now that being said, you know, if you just hand someone down targets without giving them a role and setting those targets or giving feedback, that's not a good prescription for success. Right? Team members should, you know, have some input on their budget. Again, not control of their budget because, obviously, any rational human being whose compensation is based on their targets is going to sandbag you. But but yeah. You know, the the next question is, like, monthly or quarterly reviews. Like, a lot of folks default to quarterly because they think it's gonna be less work. You know, my belief in any of this stuff is that when you do it once a month, it stays fresh. It stays at the front of your mind, and you actually end up spending equal or less time in getting a better outcome than if you try to do some big quarterly, rehash, you know, like, things are three months old, where those discussions you had about how we're gonna change performance are now three months old. So even, you know, even in those events when you're making the decision to do something quarterly because of economics, like, you don't think the can pay you. You know? I I would argue that, you know, it's a false you know, it's the the dynamic works out differently. You know? It's not three times it's not three times as much work to me monthly as it is to me quarterly. You know? I don't know if it's twice as much or one point five, you know, or whatever, but, you know, it sorry. Sorry. You know, like, the total time spent might be a little bit more, but, the result's gonna be a lot better. And finally, you know, like, the other thing that practically happens is you develop, like, red flags. Like, obviously, yeah, you're probably not gonna have a manager going in, looking every morning at their full p and l and how they're doing. But once you meet once a month, you go, well, you you you get you get to that meeting in the on the seventh in the next month, and you go, well, why did you wait till today to tell me this? Right? Like, you knew this you knew this twenty days ago. Why did you wait till this moment to come to me? So while the monthly cadence is in place, there's also red flags. There's warning flags. There's there you identify things that are okay. Well, if that happens again, don't just pay the invoice. Call me, and I will work it out. Okay? So you develop sub processes around this monthly cadence. You know, I I've I wait. I I don't wanna make this too esoteric. You know? But, you know, setting targets can also create bad incentives. Right? If somebody knows they're gonna hit their targets, they might give away discounts that they don't need to give away just to close the business a couple weeks earlier. Is that good for anybody except the sales rep? No. And maybe the client. Right? Because they're getting they're paying too little. So, you know, you gotta set intelligent targets that can be adaptive. You know? Like, just blindly saying, I don't care. Hit the number. Again, that that that's where you get yourself in trouble. You know? And I kinda have this last bullet point's kind of a joke. I've probably made it already, but, you know, when you get into larger corporations, you'll you'll be on a call with the sales regional sales guy and the general manager. And and and and everyone on that call is like, yeah. We're gonna go hit our budget. And the management's like, yeah. Get out there and hit your budget. And they're like, of course, we're gonna hit our budget. And then as soon as the call ends, the people in the finance department look at each other and go, they're not hitting their budget, are they? Right? Like so, again, you don't want you don't want things to be sort of that exaggerated, like the duality of this, you know, the budget, which is sober, practical, tactical. And so sorry. The forecast, which is sober, practical, tactical, and the budget, which is aspirational. Like you know? So, like, you do need to sometimes say, okay. You know what? We've been we we've destroyed our budget. We already gave butt people twenty percent more than they made last year. We've gotta recalibrate this budget, you know, or the reverse happens. But, you know, you gotta be prepared to do that. You know, the like, just instead of just a pure numbers based way of evaluating people's performance. Might wanna consider, like, more of a dynamic scorecard. You know? And, again, I don't, I'm not gonna get into any more than just saying that leaving management room I'd say specifically when you know someone's working really, really hard and the problem is not them and they don't hit their budget, but you don't wanna lose that person. You know? You wanna allow for some flexibility for management to to weigh in, I guess, is the best way to put it. And then, you know, finally, bottoms up versus tops down budgeting. You know? Most businesses should do a bottoms up approach. We start with our individual units. We roll it all up. That is PlanGuru's approach. You know, we will be adding some tools for doing allocations and pushing expenses down from a consolidated view to the lower levels, you know, but that's not in the road map in the next two quarters. You know, some some nonprofits, like, some nonprofits with a scarce amount of resources say, okay. This is how much money we have. We know how much money we're gonna have. Now we need to figure out how to chop that money up amongst these ten projects. You know? Again, that that's a situation where, you know, a tops down approach might be more appropriate. And, again, for now, you know, sadly, PlanGuru is not gonna be a great fit there. But, again, that's pretty pretty few and far between in our experience, again, especially, in, you know, in in the smaller nonprofit space because, again, real life you know, contributing to all these different units and rolling up is just the more common way. So, Like, a lot of people start a business because they have a good idea or they're really good at building houses or fixing sewer lines or developing software code. Right? But that doesn't mean they're necessarily a good business person. And furthermore, you know, what I what we see in a lot of nonprofits is a lot of, like, personal relationships, like family members working together, people hiring their friend, you know, people two people work together for twenty five years, and then they go off into business together. Right? You know, you can sometimes be the adult in the room. You know, a light monthly budgeting forecasting cadence is a place to get everyone together to hold difficult conversations and, you know, and sort of the you know, light is the greatest disinfectant, I guess. And, you know, like, by shining a light on these issues, you know, you can start to form your conclusions about where the real problems are and and try to help, make everyone aware of that and make better decisions going forward. So, again, this is a very common issue when a business grows to the point where the owner's not making all the important decisions anymore. Again, you got a purchasing manager. You got a sales manager. They're they're they're they may not have access to a checkbook, but they are making decisions that someone in accounting ends up paying the bill for. Right? So, yeah, you can be that adult in the room. You know, carrot and the stick, Like, I I assume many of you know the classic economic metaphor. Like, it doesn't matter doesn't matter what motivates each individual person, but a combination of of a carrot, you know, a bonus, more compensation, more authority, more power, on the one side, you know, whereas, you know, the again, nobody's screaming and yelling at anyone or hitting them with a stick these days. However, when you show up to a meeting each month and you don't know what you're talking about because you haven't been doing what you promised everyone you would do the month before, it's embarrassing at a minimum. And, again, that that just that embarrassment alone can can change, people's behavior. Should you always build a budget? You're gonna have some small the smallest of businesses. The owner might find the budgeting process. Like, what am I doing? I'm setting a budget to hold myself accountable to me. Like, I, you know, I don't need to give myself targets. I'm trying to make as much money as possible. Right? So, you know, and in that case, you know, those people primarily only care about the forecast. Right? That rolling cash flow forecast so that they can put as much money in their pockets as possible at the end of the year. So, again, when you're dealing with a smaller business, don't oversell or overemphasize, the the budgeting process. Focus more of your time on on that cash flow forecast and and making them proficient at that. And then as they grow and more people share in the responsibilities of running the company, then that those bud that budgeting process becomes more relevant. And, you know, you do need to get buy in. This is not like accounting where as long as they get you the raw documents that you need, you can you can put the pieces together. You can even if it's a shoebox full of receipts, they don't they just gotta get you the shoebox full of receipts. They don't need to sit there and think and try. Okay? But this process is different. Right? They need to think and try. They need to show up to that monthly meeting with an open mind about how I'm gonna make more money, or it's not gonna work. Right? So sometimes I say the best place to start with these services are the people that you know or or have that positive, good attitude. I'll also just say that, you know, we've talked you know, I I've hit on this a couple times, this notion of where's the paywall. Right? Where when do you start charging? How much do you charge? Do you charge an upfront fee? There's sort of a you know, you can sit down and agree to do this with a client, and, you know, you might spend an hour or so building that first run at the model. But if the client doesn't put in the time and energy to help you refine that model and and and make it better, well, then guess what? You don't put a whole lot of time into the engagement. You know? So it's kinda like this relationship where, you know, the client has to put in the time to match you. And if they don't put in the time, then it never goes anywhere, you didn't really spend that much time on it. However, the more time the client sinks into it, the more invested they become in it, the more they see the value, right, and the more likely they are to buy in and persist and keep paying you into the future. You know? So there's this kind of this bargain you're making with the clients. So I guess what that comes back to from my perspective is, you know, cast a large net. Cast a large net. You know? Offer what seems like a really attractive onboarding fee. Because even if somebody says yes and then they don't ever end up sending you the nonfinancial data you do need to build their sales forecast, Well, again, you you didn't waste that much time on it. So but but but, you know, don't waste your time and energy on somebody who's dragging their feet and isn't being a appropriate dance partner in this whole relationship. We're do another poll question here. What percentage of your clients have an efficient chart of accounts for budgeting? And, I will tell you what the number one classic issue, that we encounter as PlanGuru folks, and it is we we talk to a client. Oh, yeah. I get I'm doing three and a half million in sales. I got four different products. We sell across, you know, three, you know, three different sales channels. And then then we op we run that QuickBooks import, and there's one revenue account called sales. You know, most of the time sometimes that works. Sometimes that's appropriate. Most of the time, it's not. Right? You know? So a lot of our charts of accounts of our of our customers have been set up for a very low bar, tax and compliance. Well, we're now setting a much higher bar. Right? And a lot of times before we engage in this, we gotta take a step back and get the chart of accounts aligned with what we need it to be, for this new higher bar. Okay. I am going to close the poll in five four three two one. And I and I will just, did I share hold on. Did I share that? So I I kinda hit on some of these points on the last slide, you know, holding friends and family accountable, delegation. You know, once you've delegated something, holding someone accountable. Like, you know, you can bring them order and accountability. You know? Couple hours a month organized around a series of meetings with important team members will give them a much better handle on their business and a lot more profit over the long run. So, with that being said, I'm going to run a class three yet. I'm gonna stop my share Let my colleague, Dan pick it up from here. Alright. Can you see my screen? We can. Perfect. Yeah. Some really great insights there. Thank you, Christian. And I apologize to everybody ahead of time if I sound a little stuffy. Picked up a little bit of a head cold, which is odd when it's almost ninety degrees out. It's like the immune system, that's kind of a winter thing. So what are you doing? But, it's all good. We're gonna power through and, you know, show you some good stuff here. And, you know, to recap, what we did last week or two weeks ago, the last class, is we focused on the initial company setup and importing, foundational data. Right? Importing from Excel, if you're using accounting system we do not integrate with, or importing from QuickBooks or Xero since we integrate with those tools directly. So we walk through the, you know, creating the company, the project within the company, and then a scenario within that project. So today, we're gonna switch gears and do the fun part and start building out those aspirational budgets or the more sober, practical, tactical rolling forecasts throughout the year based on what's actually happening. And what we're looking at here is an example, company here, a multiunit operator of a fast food franchise. And up at the top right, there's my file structure. Right? So we've already created the company, which we did last week. The project is called twenty twenty six forecast, and this is a little bit different. This is a multiunit operator. So we have three separate locations that we're budgeting for individually that we're gonna roll up into a consult. We're gonna cover that consolidation process, in class three next week and how that works. We're gonna focus on location one here, and everything that we're doing in location one can be done for the other locations as well. And, you know, we're gonna do a deep dive into all of the different projection methods that are available, both on the income statement and the balance sheet. And it's all also a, you know, best practice general rule of thumb when it comes to budgeting and forecasting in PlanGuru that you start with the p and l, specifically with the revenue section, and work your way down the p and l because you can make, you know, variable cost or expenses or percentage of revenue. So you want some numbers to work with. Right? Also, you want to start with the p and l because on the balance sheets, there's going to be specific projection methods based on certain account types that require you to link to income statement accounts. So if you haven't addressed those income statement accounts, they still show zero. You know, we try to do a calculation on the balance sheet linking to those accounts, you're gonna get zeros as well. Right? So as you could see, we have already imported the chart of accounts, and I brought in two years worth of historical data. I'm gonna check that box, show previous years that toggles in those historical years. And now I I have a foundation to work off of, right, to come up with my future. And I'm forecasting out three years in this example all the way through twenty twenty eight. So the next step is to go account by account, like Christian mentioned, and start identifying projection methods that make the most sense to you. You're gonna do that by right clicking on the account and selecting edits, which brings up this window where you can select your projection methods. So right at the top, you can see what account you're in. There's the account number, account name, and then you have your projection method options. And we're gonna start with manual entry. It's gonna be the default selection for all your account at first. And that means anytime you see a yellow cell, whether it's in this grid, you know, you could type numbers into those yellow cells as opposed to the, you know, white cells here, which represent historical so we can't type directly in there. That's data that we've imported. So you could do it in this window or in the sheet itself. Right? Right in the sheet itself, these are also yellow cells so I can plug in some numbers. Now if it's something like rent expense or you're, you know, plugging in contract amounts for your customer list and you know exactly what the number is gonna be, exact months, well, you know, it's a perfect example of using manual manual entry. And if it is the same every single month and you don't wanna sit there and type it in one by one, you can right click on a number and to the rights, like so. And if I go to click edits, it's gonna show in this window here as well. We have some some additional method options. So on the left hand side, we have the projection methods. On the right hand side, we have additional options for those projection methods. And right now, let's select it as enter directly into the cells, which we've been doing. There's also apply monthly amount, kinda like the the right click and copy across. If you just want every month to be the same for a given year, you type it in the first months, everything, you know, ahead of that is adopting that number as well. There you go. That's pretty simple. And then this one's, I'd say, the more commonly used method besides the enter directly into the cells is allocate annual amount. If you had an idea of what the full year number, you know, your full year target for the budget was gonna be, and you wanted PlanGuru to spread it across the months for you, that's what this option is here for. And, actually, I'm gonna choose a an account that has some more historical data in it. Go to manual entry. So in that case, you could see in this grid, instead of the monthly cells being yellow, those are white and the full year column is yellow. So we're gonna be plugging in a full year amount in that full year column there. And based on whatever selection I make in this drop down, right now, it's evenly between the months. It's gonna take that number and spread it evenly across the months for me. Right? Peanut butter spread. But you also have the option for using last year's proportions. So it'll take a look at how the historical data was broken up last year and break it up the same way if you have some sort of seasonality that you wanna mimic from last year. You also have the ability to apply a universal, universal seasonality profile, meaning you can go into an assumptions tab and plug in percentages into those given months, and it'll break it down those percentages. And you can have multiple accounts pointing to that same universal seasonality profile. So if you wanna update that profile, all those accounts attached to it would update as well, or you can set account specific seasonality. So if you really want to dial it in for this account with percentages, you're able to do so by plugging those in to these yellow cells here. Right? So you got two areas to plug in numbers, full year dollar amounts and then the monthly percentages. And you only need to worry about eleven months here because the last month is gonna calculate for you because, obviously, this needs to add up to a hundred percent. Right? So you just need to plug in the rest. In this grid, you're gonna see a lot with these different projection methods because, you know, it shows you the area of your future numbers, right, your what you wanna use going forward, but it also shows you what they have been in the charts. So if you're not sure what to use going forward, you can see, like, in twenty twenty four, this is my, seasonality breakdown and percentages. So I can go with something similar with copy paste or, double click on the twenty twenty four there. So manual entry, method options on the right hand side. Now a couple more notes on manual entry here. A lot of times, you know, when somebody's getting set up and playing Guru for the first time, they already have a budget built out within Excel that they wanna bring in. And we talked about it a little bit last class where we can import, that budget via Excel, but you can also copy and paste directly from Excel into PlanGuru as long as the Excel file itself is in the correct format. So an example of that's so here is an example of a you know, it says historical. Let's pretend it's budget. And we have, you know, the columns. This is actually what we used to run the Excel import last time. But maybe I just have a couple of accounts I wanna bring in. I don't wanna go through that entire import process, you know, tagging columns and mapping accounts. Say I just wanna bring in, you know, twelve months worth of data here. Right? So I highlight those. Control c to copy. Come back here. Control c or sorry, v. Paste. And there you go. Alright. So you could paste values right from Excel. Now in order to do that, you know, we see people get hung up on this a lot. You gotta make sure the cells that you're being from in Excel here have the correct cell formats. That needs to be either general or number. If it's set to currency or custom or accounting, right, I try to take a few of these here. Come back here. Paste. Nothing's happening. Right? Paste. Nothing's happening. So it's very important doing that that the Excel styles have to be, very specific within the cell file, general or number. And to take it a step further, if you're doing a lot of copying and pasting, this is actually a newer feature that we just released to make it easier to do so because, you know, when you are updating these cells, you're selecting projection methods, you're, you know, updating your forecast, your budget, PlanGuru's autosaving. Right? When you plug in a number, you don't have to hit a save button. It's autosaving to the database. Right? So when we're doing a lot of copying and pasting, it's telling the database to do a lot of saves, which can sometimes, you know, hang up and hang up the model and, you know, it'll a little message will appear that says, basically, give me a second. I need to save all this. Right? Because after every time you, you know, make that action, it triggers the PlanGuru database to do that auto save. So if you plan on doing a bunch of copying and pasting, you can go to utilities and go into enable copy paste mode. You can click this button right here. And then able to do all of that is essentially turns off the auto save. And when ready to then go for, go forward with the numbers that you plugged in, you just click, you know, update or, you know, import. You know, up at the top, there's a little go button, and all those numbers, will then be auto saved. It'll save you some time instead of it, you know, maybe getting hung up a little bit if you're doing a lot of copying and pasting. That has saved our cuss some of our customers doing that and our support team, believe it or not, a ton of time. So manual entry, default selection for all your accounts at first. But then we have some additional options that do, you know, calculations for you based on historical data, things like historical trend and average. You know? You come across an account like, office supplies, utilities, expense, you know, waste disposal. You don't you don't wanna get too granular with those. You just wanna make it an average of the past six months and go with that. Right? You would select that account, select historical trend or average, and you have some options here. Right? So select the method on the left, and you have some options on the right. You could do a trend calculation or an average calculation. A trend calculation is essentially doing linear regression analysis, based on historical data, which is a fancy saying it's, you know, calculating a slope, right, and pushing that slope forward, whether that's trending up or down. And then it's up to you, you know, what dataset you wanna give it, what data points. It could be annual amounts. So depending on how many years you brought in, say that's five years, that's five data points. And you could tell, you know, PlanGuru how far out you wanna go. I have a max of two, so it's brought in two historical years. And then, you know, it'll then project out your, future annual amounts, and you tell PlanGuru then what you want it to do, with those annual amounts. You know, how you want it to it to spread across the months, evenly between the month, based on seasonality, last year's fourth is similar to what you saw in the manual entry. But if you only have two years like me and, you know, the more recent historical data is more relevant, I like to go with the monthly trend. So in that case, we're not looking at annual data points. We're looking at data points of the trailing, meaning we're looking backwards, and you could tell PlanGuru how many months you wanna go back. Right? I think the max is twelve. Yes. So it'll leave those data points. And as you could see it, when I change the numbers, the values automatically update. So you can review them before you go ahead and click update. Average, pretty simple calculation. Right? It's just taking those data points, adding them all up, dividing by however many data points there are. So if you wanna do an average of past six months, there you go. So you can see the difference. Right? We're doing an average of the past six months. We're just getting a flat amount, kinda like that peanut butter spread. Sorry. It's taking the average of the past six months here. When you're doing the trends, you're getting some different numbers either going up or down based on that trend, in this case, going up every single month. Now a less commonly used because I think people don't necessarily know about it. When you wanna use the average calculation and, you know, you wanna use the monthly data point set, but you don't want it to be just flat. You wanna incorporate some sort of seasonality. You know, you have the type of business where most of the expenses are coming in summer months or something like that. We have this option here. Instead of of the trailing six months, you could do year over year. So what that means is every single month is averaging out the same month going back however many years you tell it to. So in my case, two years. So every single month, different. Right? It's only looking at that month's historical data and average it out. So, therefore, you know, some months might be higher, some months might be lower. It's not your seasonality. That's a very useful one, I think, not a lot of people know about. Next up would be growth rate, another commonly very commonly used projection method here. If you have a specific sales goal, you know, you wanna grow sales ten, fifteen, twenty percent, you know, easy peasy, you can plug that right in. You have some options here on the right. Base to grow, so you could do year over year, month over month. So year over year, what this means is if I plug in a twenty percent in April there, it's gonna look at April's historical amount, apply that twenty percent to give me future April's dollar amount. Right? So instead of looking at and we could really update the formatting here to show some percentages. But, you know, instead of looking at dollar amounts in this grid, you're looking at percentages here. And the rest of the months to do the same thing, I could just right click and copy that across. So May is gonna be twenty percent higher than May of last year and so on. Month over month is a more aggressive approach. Right? So instead of April looking at April of last year, looking at the most previous month, which is March, right, and applying whatever growth rate percentage that you specify. So that's five percent. Now if I copy that across, then May is looking at April, which is five percent higher, and June is looking at May, which is five percent higher. Right? So that's a steady, steady growth rate. Those numbers would be going up, every single month. So what I've seen people do there is, you know, once they get to a certain level where they wanna, you know, either plateau the growth or maybe do some negative growth because you can plug in negative numbers here. Right? You know, you add the you add the amounts up into that month, and then, you know, you could put a zero in there. So, essentially, it stops the growth rate, and you'll get, you know, some flat numbers that'll plateau at that point. So, again, great for applying a percentage, for sale or inflationary percentages for certain expenses. Right? You don't wanna do a historical average or the trend calculation. You just wanna, you know, apply a three percent inflationary rates on the expense because, you know, it's just gonna go up by three percent every year. That's exactly how you do it with this growth rate option here. And it looks like we might have a couple questions. So if we upset update something manually on the income statement, where does the other side of that entry go? For example, if we add a line within total revenue that increase increases slash decreases the revenue to account for the work in process balance for construction company, where did the other side of the entry end up? Well, if you are plugging in a value into the revenue section, that is naturally gonna show up in the cash accounts. Right? The cash is gonna automatically come up. And we're gonna talk a little bit about how the three financial statements are talking to each other and kicking and tying as you're making adjustments to, both the income statement and balance sheet account. But, generally, you know, the cash flow statement's automatically calculated for you. And, you know, when you're applying values to the income accounts, the expense accounts, obviously, that's adjusting your net income at the bottom, which is then driving the cash flow statement as well. And when we get to the balance sheets, there's going to be specific projection methods that we can then apply and connect to corresponding income statement accounts too. Right? So anytime something changes in your income statement, it will affect that specific balance sheet account that you're linking it to. So we're definitely gonna get to that. So another great question. So, basically, more historical data imported, the more accurate the budget slash forecast data. Yes. Generally, we we recommend doing at least two years by month if you have it. You know? It doesn't mean if you don't have it, you can't do, you know, one year. I mean, there's there's companies that don't have any historical data, and they're using PlanGuru, you know, as a, to build a start up model to go out go out and get some financing from the bank or, you know, some investors. So, you know, when you don't have historical data, some of these projection methods just aren't as useful, obviously. If you don't have any historical data to apply the growth rate to, you're gonna get zeros. Right? Historical trend or average is probably not something you're gonna use. That type of situation, you know, you're probably gonna rely heavily on this last option here linked to assumptions and KPIs, which we're definitely gonna get into today, which is, you know, a way to get more granular, more detailed, hopefully, more accurate with your projections and base it off of you know, tailor it to your specific industry and business needs, which, investors love to see as well. Alright. So a couple more points on growth rate here. Right? So, obviously, you can apply growth rate percentages to individual accounts, you know, using these options here. You can delay the growth rate. So if you wanted to have the growth rate starts in, we'll say, year over year, you know, I don't want the growth rate to start until twenty twenty seven. Meaning, twenty twenty six will be manual entry, and then the growth rate will go off of those numbers. Right? That's what that means. Start growth over. By default, just looking at your first historical year, but you can change that. You can delay the growth rate start date. And then growth rate source. Right? By default, each account that you're doing here is gonna be, you know, specific to that account, enter the growth rate. So this account could be a five percent growth rate. Another account could be, you know, six percent, whatever it is. If you want to like that inflationary example, you wanna connect multiple accounts to the same growth rate percentage. Right? So, therefore, if you wanna change that percentage, you don't have to go to each account individually and change it from, you know, a a three percent to a four percent or vice versa. Right? You don't wanna change it in one area, and you want all the accounts linked to that, that growth rate to update as well. Well, you could do that. You can link to an assumptions line. Right? That's the second option here. And what I've done, or what we could do, is when you drop down this menu up top here, this is how you're navigating between your three financial statements as well as accessing your assumptions tabs. And we're gonna go over these extensively when we start, you know, doing some examples of, those custom calculations. But there's one default assumptions tab right out of the box called assumptions. This is where I usually like to, you know, add something like this, where you can add a line in here and call it growth rate percentage or inflation. We'll go ahead and add it. Inflation here. Inflation percentage. Right? So I'm adding a line. Right click, add line. This is gonna be manual entry because I'm gonna plug that number in. The full year column, I just wanna see an average in case you plug in different types of, or different, numbers in those months. I wanna see an average for the year. And then number formatting options. So, you know, when you're adding a line like this, you can choose whole numbers, decimals, cents, or dollars. In this case, we're gonna go with percents. And we'll do three percents, copy that across, click add. Gonna take a second to load. And now we have a line to reference. Right? So if I come back to the income statement and I go to utilities expense again, growth rates. I wanna link to an assumptions line. There's my two percentage. I can click update. Right? And it's gonna go off of that three percent. I can do the same thing for, you know, office supplies or just laundry. Right? I can link them all to that same line. So then all I need to do is go back to that line and adjust it from three percent to four percent, and everything linked to it would automatically update as well. So that's that's a seldom used, but, you know, big time saver, that we'd see a lot of our our customers applying there. And then last of what I like to consider, you know, the standard quick and easy income statements projection methods here is called percent of other accounts, typically used for cost account accounts or other variable expenses. You wanna make a percentage of revenue or a specific revenue account, or it could be, you know, in your payroll benefits, right, or payroll taxes to your wages accounts. So if the wages account is going up, you're doing some sort of hiring, that the taxes are gonna go up as well. Right? So this is as simple as, you know, selecting the account and selecting this percent, percent of other accounts method. And the first thing you're doing is you're selecting what you want this account to be a percentage of. In this case, I selected all three of these food sales accounts, but it could be something like total revenue. Or like I said, if you're, you know, doing this for benefits or payroll taxes, you'd be selecting something like salaries. Right? You make your selection, and then you, you enter the percentage you wanna use going forward. So just like with those other options, you have the yellow cell where you can plug in what you wanna use going forward. But the what's really nice about this one, depending on what selection you make, and you'll kinda see it change a little bit if I add something else here, you could see the historical data adjusts based on the linkage between those accounts. So it's looking at the historical relationship between the accounts that you're linking up and showing you what the percentages have been in the past with an average year in the full year column. Right? So twenty five point six seven percents. So I can go with something like that. Right? I can say, you know, twenty six, copy that across. Or, you know, if I wanna go exactly what it was last year, right, I could just double click on twenty twenty five here, and it'll populate the next three years with those same exact percentages as you could see. You just double click on that, that year. So pretty self explanatory, this percentage of of other accounts. We're gonna come back to this in a little bit when we get to, calculating depreciation expense for some, for some fixed assets. But, yeah, that's the first four here, manual entry through historical trend or average are what I like to consider the standard quick and easy projection methods, easy to understand, easy to apply. Most of your accounts will probably use one of those, but then we have this one down here. You know, if one of these isn't working exactly how you need it or you get more granular breaking down revenue by product or services by different service level, you know, breaking down projects if you're a construction company or inventory if you're a manufacturing company. We're gonna run through of that with the assumptions and KPIs. But before we dive into that, it's more, you know, advanced calculations. There are also some standard projection methods on the balance sheet side of things as well. Oh, actually, before I move to the balance sheet, there is another method in this section down here. So provision for taxes is one of the default sections that we include in your p and l here. And when you add or import an account into this section, you have the option to just, apply this account type, which is other taxes, which basically just gives you those standard projection methods. And if it's an account like, you know, federal corporate tax, that's just a flat rate of twenty one percent. Right? You'd just be using percent of other accounts and link it up to your, you know, income before taxes line or income from operations. Right? That's a flat tax. And some states, like Pennsylvania, also have a flat rate. But some states still have tax brackets. Right? State taxes. So we had this taxes based on net income option here. So when you change the account type, you have a different format where you can start entering in some tax brackets. So I can go zero to two hundred fifty thousand. You know, I can continue to add some here. I can add my tax rates. Just making stuff up here at twenty one. And, you know, based on these tax brackets and the income before taxes, it'll automatically calculates the, the tax, amounts for you in that line. You could also make manual adjustments right here and compute negative tax, which would be, you know, for tax credits, overpayments, you know, carry forward tax losses, stuff like that. You could check that box if you wanna show some negative tax. But, again, a lot of our a lot of our, users just go with a We should probably do another poll question here. Yep. When you when you got a chance. Yeah. I'm gonna move over to the balance sheet, so let's fire fire one up while that's loading. I know this is kind of a ambiguous question, but, you know, obviously, we have all different types of systems that can track all different types of nonfinancial information. Guess the better way to say this, is there an effort to pull all that out and look at it on a regular basis that's efficient. Okay. I'm gonna close the poll in five four three two one. We're gonna we're gonna be talking about that nonfinancial data pretty soon here. It is super important, you know, for coming up with accurate, you know, projections when it comes to revenue and expenses like payroll, you know, identifying certain accounts that have the biggest impact on the business. So like I said, general rule of thumb is starting with the income statement then moving over to balance sheet. Now there's some special accounts on the balance sheets that are automatically calculated for you. So you don't need to select a projection method for them. Cash is one of them. Right? The cash line up top is automatically generated and calculated for you based on everything else that's happening in the income statement and balance sheet. You can change the name. Right click. If you wanna call it cash or bank accounts, add an account number, could totally do that. But you need to apply a projection method. Manual entry. Right? So we did manual entry on the income statement where plugging in, basically, the monthly activity that you can expect, you know, in a given account. Manual entry works a little bit different in the balance sheet side of things. Right? You can either, you know, plug it right into the sheet like we did on the income statement, but what you'd be plugging in is what you think the future balance would be, right, not to change the balance. So if I wanted this to grow, you know, by fifty thousand dollars, I type in four hundred thousand. And you'll see actually what happens to cash right up top there automatically when I do that. Cash automatically went down. Right? That's essentially me forecasting purchase or, you know, a lethal improvement. So notice what also happened in front. Right? That's my new balance going forward. So if I wanted to go up another fifty thousand in July, four fifty. Right? Now if you don't wanna do that and you'd rather, you know, plug in you know, itemize it or plug in the specific change to the balance in a given month instead of plugging in the balance, well, you could just do that by right clicking on the account and selecting edits. Manual entry is selected, and you could see it's actually showing the change here, both historically and going forward. There's the two fifties that I plugged in. And if I zero this out, we're gonna get back to the three fifty there. And this so when you want to enter the change in the balance sheet, that's going to be right click at it in the method selector window there. If you just put the balance right in, you're gonna do that right in the sheet there. Now if you wanted to, you know, break this down further in what's called a supporting schedule, You can do that in the assumptions. So say you have a list of items that then make up total change that you wanna then link to the corresponding, balance sheet account here. So you can go to assumptions, kinda like what I did with the inflation, and I created a brand new assumptions tab by clicking add new here, and I called it CapEx. Right? And anytime you add a new assumptions tab, it's gonna start out blank, and you can right click add line or separator. So the blank rows in between these lines are separators, make it a little bit easier to read. Maybe it's just line after line after line. And you could also, you know, create totals, right, which I've done here. So here's some lines I've added. And, you know, how much I think I'm gonna spend per month, and then I told them up. I created what's called a total group by right clicking and giving the group a name. And then I wanna take that total and link it to the corresponding fixed asset account. We saw improvements. Right? So I go back to the income statement. Oh, sorry. Balance sheet. Edit. So instead of manual entry, I can link to assumptions and KPIs. I can link to that total by expanding CapEx, shows me all the lines within it. Check the box next to the total. And then this is a key. Right? In that in that assumptions tab, I'm showing the, you know, changes. It's not, you know, the the balance that I want the, you know, fixed asset account to show. It's the change to the balance. So I wanna make sure I'm checking this box right here, accumulate amount. So it's gonna take the most recent historical balance and apply those changes to give you a new balance going forward. Click update. And there it is. So the balance is now going up by those amounts. And this is a perfect, moment to then talk about appreciation expense and accumulated depreciation. Back on the income statement, this goes back to what I was saying where you wanna start with the income statement then move to the balance sheet. You know, back on the income statement, you might have an account like I do here, depreciation expense, leasehold. Now this also goes back to what Christian was saying in in that poll question and, you know, in its slides, having an efficient chart of accounts for budgeting and forecasting. You know, he mentioned the example for just one account called sales. Right? I might just have one account called food sales even though I have three, you know, revenue streams. You know, that's an example of where you need it to be more more detailed, the chart of accounts. But on the other side of that, you know, you might have a bunch of, individual accounts for different softwares that you're using, QuickBooks, PlanGuru, and anytime you add a new software, you're adding a new account. Well, that's probably not needed because you could just add one account, create a supporting schedule, that, you know, totals up and and links to that specific account. So for something like this, you might also have one account called depreciation expense, but we have depreciation expenses, you know, of multiple assets, right, that have different life of the asset, right, different lifespans. And you wanna do different straight line depreciation calculations off of those asset classes. So, you know, if you don't have it broken out like this in QuickBooks, you could also, you know, just right click and add accounts in here manually. So you can, you know, add accounts into PlanGuru that don't necessarily live in QuickBooks, you know, from an actual standpoint, but it'll help you become more, you know, detailed, more granular from a budgeting and forecasting standpoint. You know, from an actual standpoint, it'll still just, you know, import into that one line, but you can break it down further and total it up if you wanna see it, you know, broken up in a little bit more detail. But the income statement, you know, is sort of like the where we begin to tell the story. Right? And, you know, if it's not detailed enough, then we literally learn nothing from it. You know? Conversely, if it's, too detailed and there's all types of garbage accounts, you know, we then, it's hard to read the story, you know, without getting, you know, without spending too much time. You know? So Exactly. It's about striking that correct balance. One hundred percent. And it makes more sense because what you're gonna be two different types of calculations that I need to do instead of you know, if it was just one line, I'd have to blend the rates. Right? So I'm gonna right click on this account, and you can see it has a special account type, accretion depreciation, depletion, and amortization. Right? When I give it that account type, it then allows me to link to a corresponding cumulated depreciation. Like, yeah, in this case, Right? And then for calculating depreciation expense, we're using the percent of other accounts method. Right? Previously, I showed you an example of just linking an expense or a cost account to total revenue. Here, we're linking an expense account to something on the balance sheet, which you have. Right? You can go income statement or balance sheet. So you could see we're linking to that fixed asset account here. And, you know, the reason that we're going with point eight three percent is, you know, based on the life of the asset. So, you know, if it's five years, you know, that's sixty months. A hundred divided by sixty is one point six seven percent. So I go with something like that. I was at five year. Right? So it's obviously a little bit longer. Now notice I plugged it in as a negative percentage here. Right? So that's because this is in the other income and expense section within PlanGuru. This section can have both income accounts or expense accounts. So the sign of the number matters when it comes to calculating that income. Right? If this is a positive number, PlanGuru is treating it as an income account. The negative number is treating it as an expense. If you had depreciation expense in your operating expenses, which you noted here are all positive numbers, well, then you plug in a positive percentage. Right? Because it's subtracting the operating expenses to give you your income from operations. So that's a key distinction right there when you're doing the calculation depending where the expense account is located. Okay? We see that a lot. So, you know, it's calculating the monthly depreciation based on that percentage and linking to the balance sheet account. And then remember, this is automatically linking to the accumulated depreciation account back on the balance sheet too. So you can see here, accumulated depreciation, that number is getting larger from a negative aspect based on the depreciation expense account it's being linked to right there. You'll notice when I edit it, there's not really much you do here. Right? It's just saying it's linked to the, depreciation account. So another really good example for percentage other accounts, that projection method there. Another good example of, you know, having a balance sheet account linking to somewhere on the income statement is AR, accounts receivable. So when I edit this accounts, you're gonna see a lot of these different account types on balance sheet side of things. And each account type corresponds with a different unique projection method. So right now, this is set to trade receivables. That's allowing me to choose this average days to collect method. Now I have the, you know, standard methods. If I wanna use any of those or create a custom calculation, I can totally do that. But this method allows you to then link to your corresponding revenue accounts that would drive AR, and then you can plug in the terms. What are the average days it takes you to collect those funds? Could be thirty, forty five, sixty, ninety, what anywhere in between. This is a fast food franchise, so I just plugged in something here that doesn't really make sense for there's not a lot of AR in fast food. So, that's why you're seeing the seven there, but, I just wanted to show the example. So based on what you link to here, it's gonna apply those terms, say it was thirty days, to give you your projected AR balances going forward, Just then have an immediate impact on cash. Right? As these numbers go up and down, cash automatically goes up and down as well. Now similar example here. If you only have one AR accounts, but you have different, you know, customers in different buckets of payment terms. Right? Maybe most of your customers are in the sixty day bucket, but then you have a couple larger customers in the ninety day bucket and a few smaller customers in the thirty day bucket. Right? Well, that's why it's called average days to collect. Right? So you can come back here and link to multiple revenue accounts and, you know, plug in your average days to collect here. Right? But if you wanna see it separate in those buckets, you can do that too. So if you wanna do your customer breakdown in an assumptions tab, you have the ability to, you know, link to, something in the assumptions tab as well. So if I hit cancel, and, I added a brand new assumptions tab, I called it AR here, started out blank, but kinda similar to what we were doing with the the CAPS. Right? Listing out items, in this case, customers, breaking down the revenue here, and then I can link to these totals. So, therefore, what you could do is when you go back to the balance sheet, just like the depreciation expense example. Right? Because you only have one account called, you know, AR within QuickBooks, but you can add additional accounts in here. Say it's AR sixty days just for budgeting and forecasting purposes. Average days to collect, assumptions and KPIs, band AR. Here's my total sixty day. That's what I'm doing. I'm plugging in sixty days here. Alright? So when I when I click add here, it'll add that account, and it'll, you know, be calculating based on the specific customer revenue associated with those sixty day terms going across. And you could do that for thirty days, ninety days, and then take the all those AR accounts, you know, highlight them like this, right click, give it a name, you know, group name, accounts receivable, whatever you wanna call it, and it'll give you a total. So that way, you have the detail, right, instead of just using an average days to collect, which you certainly could. It's the easier way to do it. Right? But if you need to see that detail and you need see it broken out from a, you know, cash flow perspective, adding those extras account those extra accounts to creating a total group is the way to go. Base cost of sales be next up. So based on the account type of inventory here, we have this days cost of sales method. Kinda similar to the AR method where you're plugging in days here, but you can choose which cost accounts you want this being linked to. So you're, you know, cost of goods sold. This is a good way to back into your projected, inventory needs based on your projected sales and your cost of goods sold. Great for, you know, wholesale distribution type companies. And it's more or less, you know, answering the question, how much how many days of inventory would you like to have on hand based on your, you know, projected COGS? Right? And, you know, based on what you're selecting here, it'll show you what it's been in the past. Again, I don't have the best data here for for this sample company. So you can go with something similar. You plug in those days. It'll look in at the projected cogs for those accounts that you're linking to, apply those to date to give you your projected inventory balances going forward. So it backs into that. We're gonna do an example later where, you know, if you're a manufacturing company and you need to show, you know, the Wow. The transition of inventory from raw materials to work in progress to finished goods, you know, you could do that, say, by products within an assumptions tab and really dial it in as well. That's a high level inventory calculation there. Prepaid expenses. So this is the last one on the current asset section here. So when the account type is selected as other current assets, it gives you this prepaid expense tool here where, again, you're linking to something on the income statement. So the classic example is prepaid insurance here. So, you know, at the bottom in this grid, you plug in your additions. When are you prepaying and for how much? In my case, it's three thousand dollars every January. Right? The rest are zero. Right? I'm just making those payments once a year. And then, you know, those balances are gonna get amortized down based on my monthly insurance expense. So if I go to expand operating expense here, you'll see insurance general liability is checked there. So that three thousand dollars, it's starting to go down every single month until pops up again in January of next year. Right? So you could see that progression right there. Pops back up, starts to go down again, and that's based on it being linked to this insurance expense accounts. Right? Two fifty a month. That's what it's going down by. And, again, we see, you know, for multiple sometimes we see account, a chart of accounts with just one prepaid expense account where there's multiple expenses that are being prepaid and on different schedules and different amounts. Right? So that's another example, kinda like the AR and the depreciation expense where you might wanna add more detail in the assumptions tab, you know, add additional account in that section to see that breakdown. And then getting to the liabilities, accounts payable works exactly the same way as they except you're linking to cost or expenses. You're not paying right away based on your terms, called average days to pay instead of average days to collect. So works exactly the same. I'm not gonna spend too much time here on that. And then accrued expenses. Things like, payroll liabilities, quarterly bonuses, stuff like that. Right? Account types other current liabilities. That gives you this method right here, accrued expenses, and allows you to link to those expenses. So this example, I have a bonus account on my income statement there, and, you know, those bonuses are getting paid out quarterly. So you make the connection here by checking that box. You have your pay liability period selection here. So it could be weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly. If you're choosing anything, you know, beyond monthly here, it's then gonna be an option of, you know, when in the quarter. Is it the first month, second month, third month? In my case, I selected the first month. Okay. Semiannually. Okay. You know, first, second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth month. Right? You can make that selection. If it's annually, which month of the year? Or you can select specific months if it's a kind of an odd schedule, you could say, you know, January, February, March, August, something like that. So after you make your selection, we'll stick with this. Take a look at this. So you could see it starts to accrue up until June that gets paid down. Right? Start to accrue. Next quarter, gets paid down. Starts to accrue, gets paid down. And that's all based on the linkage to this bonus. I was doing a simple bonus calculation, percent of other accounts. We're making it a percentage of the salary for the managers, five percent. Right? So that's the monthly bonus amount, but paid quarterly paid out quarterly from a cash flow perspective. Accrued expense. Let's see. Line of credits. Hey, Dan. Let me do another poll question here. Sure. I will switch this one back to entry. So I'd say, I guess, this would be in the past. Before you started using PlanGuru, what percentage of the time did you actually forecast the balance sheet and cash flow as opposed to just doing a p and l budget? K. I'm gonna close the poll in five four three two one. It's good to see. I go for it. So line of credit. If you have a line of credit with the bank that you're constantly extending and paying down, we have a specific method for that. I click edit. The account type is like in here, short term notes payable, which will then give you this line of credits option here. And it's, you know, a series of settings here that you're establishing that then, you know, PlanGuru decides when to extend the line of credit and when to pay it down. The minimum cash balance. Right? What what threshold do you wanna set for when the line of credit needs to be extended? Right? Maybe it's ten thousand dollars, whatever it might be. You don't wanna go below ten thousand dollars. Advanced pay down in in increments of. That defaults to five hundred. I usually stick with five hundred. That means anytime it's getting, you know, advanced or paid down, it's doing it, you know, in tranches of five hundred dollars. You'd see fifteen hundred dollars, two thousand dollars, you know, twenty five hundred, etcetera. The lower with this number, you know, you can go down to a hundred or something. But, you know, if you lower it all the way down to, say, one one dollar, it's causing PlanGuru to do more detailed calculations, so it might slow down the model a little bit. So we usually recommend keeping this number a little bit higher to make the model a little more nimble and, faster loading. So keep that in mind. When is the first month of the line available? So if you wanna delay it for whatever reason, you could choose a future month and, you know, the the months up until that month will just be manual entry similar to what I showed you in the growth rate option and then the line of credit limit. Right? How much can you borrow at any given time? This number has to be higher than this number. So maybe as an example, okay. Let's maybe make a pretty large purchase or, leasehold improvements or kitchen equipment. Let's do something large there. Make that, three hundred. So we got negative cash now showing up top there. Right? So if we wanted to apply that to the line of credit, we'll say ten thousand minimum, hundred thousand max, stick with five hundred, click updates. You can see the line oh, that's not what I wanna say. Now we're gonna switch. But what you should be seeing is the amount to bring this dollar out back to ten thousand. So, you know, it should show about sixty thousand. And anytime you have excess cash, it'll automatically pay it down as well. So it extends it up into that threshold and paid it down up until that threshold. And I'll see why I'm getting that syntax error. For long term liabilities. Right? So that's short term financing, long term financing, loans that you're taking out, whether they're existing loans or, you know, new, loans, maybe to finance a new piece of equipment. Right? That's another example we could do here. Let's see. We added one for a hundred sixty five thousand. We have something called the note payable tool. So for an existing loan, right click x, we have the note payable tool where you can specify whether it's new or existing, how many months are left on the loan. It'll pick up the, most recent historical balance of that loan automatically for you, and then you're selecting your payment type. Usually, you know, folks are just sticking with this fixed payment, including interest and principal here. And then you have the option to either enter in the monthly payment if you know what that is. If you don't, but you know what the interest rate is, you can plug that in, which I'm doing here, six percent. And when I click next, based on this information I'm entering, it'll automatically calculate the amortization schedule for me. So month by month, total payment, interest expense portion, principal portion, ending balance. Right? All the way to my end of the model here, which is December, so I have a balance at the end of that. And then for the interest expense portion here, I can choose to link that to the corresponding interest expense accounts. Alright? So this option right here, do you want to link the interest expense to an account in the other income and expense section? I think by default, it will say no. I chose yes, and then I can choose account to link it to, right, based on the account type that it was assigned when I imported it or added it manually. I can choose that by checking that box. So that means, you know, these values right here will automatically show up in this account right here. That's what I'm linking to. Let's add a brand new one for that kitchen equipment purchase we made for a hundred and sixty five. Right? So right now, we're showing little over fifty thousand in cash. Let's add a brand new one. So we're just forecasting out what a new loan would look like, financing that new piece of equipment. I wanna use a no payable tool. Let's say new equipments. Give it a name. This is going to be, let's say, a five year loan, sixty months. And I believe that was April on sixty five. Sound like a cost. And we're gonna stick with that, and we're gonna do a, you know, five percent interest rate. So there's my amortization schedule. There's the interest expense portion. I can link it up. Save notes. And there oh, it started in another month. Just try to there we go. The cash came back up. Click on the financing. Now all of this is then flowing through the, cash flow statement. So like I mentioned in the beginning, this cash line up top is automatically calculating for you based on everything that's happening in the balance sheet. Right? Balance sheet's automatically balancing because of that, and the cash flow statement will show the breakdown of your CAC movements. So you have your net income starting at the top from coming from your projected net income on the income statement. Then you got your change to your current assets and current liabilities, things like AR, AP, group bonuses. Right? Investment activities, that's your, you know, fixed asset purchases, finance activities, all culminating in this net change in cash at the bottom calculating for you. That's then linking to the cash at the end of the period, which is then linking to the cash line right here. So that's all three financial statements are talking to each other and ticking in time. And then one more thing on the balance sheet before maybe we dive into some assumptions and KPIs is, retained earnings, another special account just like cash. It's automatically calculating for you. You do not need to select a projection method for it, calculating based on the projected net income coming from the income statement and applying that to the previous month's balance. You could also right click edit. And if you wanted to, you know, make any adjustments or distributions, things like that to their retained earnings account, you could do that manually, enter the amounts in the months or make it a percentage of net income. When you plug in a percentage in here, it'll look at the net projected net income and multiply it by that percentage to give you a value. But, no, I like to have those broken out into separate accounts, things like owner's equity, owner's draw, and have them separate from retained earnings because then those show up on the cash flow statement in detail as well instead of having them kind of baked into the retained earnings. Not just my personal preference, but you could do either. So, Christian, anything we need to touch on before we move over to some more advanced calculations? I don't think so. I don't know that we have time. So just keep keep going. Good job. Yeah. We'll we'll, we'll keep it simple on some of these and, you know, maybe get more detailed at the beginning of next next week's class. But going back to the income statement, right, and food sales specifically. So, you know, I have three separate revenue streams. Dine in, folks coming to the restaurant, drive through, you know, people waiting to order through the car, and then delivery. It'd be like delivery app. So breaking that that down further. But, you know, what if I wanted to break it down further than that and break it up by May part, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I wanted to base the calculation off of the number of people coming into the restaurant, the number of orders being placed, you know, what is the average, dollar spent, you know, per order, stuff like that, instead of just applying a growth rate or historical average, which you totally do. But, you know, getting more granular, more accurate with these with these, revenue accounts will allow you to tell the story a little bit better when you're putting together your reporting packages and see where you hit your marks, where did you miss them, and so on, making adjustments. So, again, going to the assumptions, I created one called food sales. And again, this started out complete, blank at first, right click, add line, and I added a bunch of lines and gave them names based on what I wanted them to represent. And here are my three sections of line by three groups, dine in, drive through, delivery. When I expand them, they're further broken down into breakfast, lunch, and dinner, where the first line I added represents the number of checks I can expect. And these are yellow cells, right, which means manual entry. I can come in here and make adjustments from month to month based on what my goals are. And then the second line represents average check size, right? So that's also a different format, a dollar amount. And then the third line is where I'm doing the calculation. This number times this number gives me my projected dine in breakfast sales. Now when you're adding lines here, this camera adding one up top here. So when I add it to the first time, you're naming the line up top and you're selecting a projection method for it. Now the first two lines are using manual entry because I just plug those numbers in for what I I are. And, you know, I'm I'm plugging those numbers in based on maybe, like, point of sale system, that I'm referencing and tracking, you know, historically what those numbers are, and I can even bring those in via an Excel import if I want. So I'm choosing, you know, manual entry, and I'm choosing for, you know, say this account, the number of checks. Right click edit. So the full year column in these assumptions tabs can act in different ways depending on, you know, the the theme of the the line that you're adding here. So this is the total number of checks. Right? So I wanna take that that full year column and actually see a total. I wanna see the total of all the months, the monthly breakdown of the number of checks. But for something like average check size where I can adjust this dollar amount from month to month, you know, maybe I'm expecting some, you know, price increases starting in August or something like that. Right? I don't wanna see a total of those. Right? I wanna see an average. So right click edit. Still manual entry. I'm plugging those numbers in, but this is what I choose right here, right, instead of total. You could also do balance as well. And then the number format, you know, the first line I showed you was using whole numbers. This line is using dollar amounts. We showed you how to change its percentage. Earlier, you could also just do decimals as well and specify the number of decimal places. So, you're making your selection and your formatting options there on the right. Now, when it comes to creating this formula, right, how I'm multiplying these two lines together. When I added this, again, I named it. And instead of choosing manual entry, I chose formula builder. This is how we're creating these custom calculations. And with this formula builder, I can reference any account into my income statement as a variable in the I can reference any account my balance sheet as a variable or many of the lines I've added to my assumptions tabs I can reference. So if I was creating this from scratch, we'll expand food sales here. That shows me, you know, when I expand that assumptions tab, that shows me all the lines within that tab. Right? If I scroll down, those are all the lines right there. And I'm gonna start at the top here and see dine in breakfast number of checks. Double click on that. When you double click on a variable, it populates in that window above. Find the multiplication symbol on the right, double click, and then average check size, double click. There's my formula. But obviously, other operators to choose from here, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, you can create longer, more advanced calculations with nested parentheses. So if you needed to add some things together before multiplying them, you could totally do that. You could add specific amounts to the formula. So say you had to multiply this by negative one or by another, you know, variable. You could plug in that amounts and click apply. I'll just do some random here so you could see it. Alright? So it adds it to that syntax. And then you have some four more functions to choose from here that basically act the same way as they do within Excel, things like max, mins calculations, averages, sums, sum ifs. Right? You know, pretty rare a lot of our users are getting too heavy into these, but for more advanced calculations or if you have a ton of lines in here and you don't wanna sit there and, you know, double click each line and then hit the plus sign, double click each line, hit the plus sign, and go back and forth. Well, if it they're in con contiguous. Right? They're in a they're in a row, those lines. Well, you can double click on the first one, you know, do a sum, double click on the first one, you know, add the, semicolon operator, and then double click on the last one, just like you do in Excel. Right? And it'll add up everything in between. So it's a much shorter formula that gets you to the same results. And then, we'll touch on this a little bit with different calculations, we're gonna show you. But, you know, if you need to reference a prime numbers in the calculation, you could do that. If you need to reference a future month, you could do that. You know, if you need to accumulate the amounts instead of it just calculating month to month, you want to accumulate, you could do that. And then by defaults, these formulas only apply to the budgeted and forecasted months going forward. Right? So say you have actual showing through mark and you create a formula here, it's only gonna apply, you know, by default from April on. But if you want this formula to also apply to, you know, the historical months, the actual months, you know, you can make that designation right here. So point is, I've done that for breakfast, dine and breakfast. There's another formula for dine and lunch, dine and dinner. So, breaking it up by daypart. And then, here is a total of all those. Right? So total dine in sales. I then wanna take this total and link it to the corresponding revenue account. Right? Dine in edits. We're using link to assumptions and KPIs. We're making a selection. Right click or sorry. Expand. And then we're just checking the box next to the die in cells. Right? So once that box is checked and that link is live, that total is now being fed directly into that revenue account. So you're seeing the total here, you know, that extra layer of detail is happening in the assumptions tab. And what's beautiful about assumptions tabs is they're also recordable. So when you're putting together recorded packages, which you'll see, you know, next week, adverse actual comparisons, you know, not only the financials at a high level, total level, but also, you know, you can put together budget or the actual comparisons for those assumptions lines, which helps you tell the story. Right? We're twenty percent higher in revenue. Why is that? We sold this many more units, or we increased the price, you know, the average order price by this much, in this specific channel, dine in breakfast. Right? You're able to get down to that level of detail and, and make adjustments to maybe underperforming channels, stuff like that. So high level example, I've had to create a custom calculation that then links to, revenue. Now another major one that we see our users building all the time is breaking down payroll by employee. So you can keep it pretty simple in here like this. You know, this is a suite franchise where I have some managers that are salaried as well as some other employees, hourly employees that we're not breaking down by named employee. We're just tracking a headcount. I have some federal, state, and benefits percentages at the top that I'm bouncing the salaries and wages off of. And, again, you're just right clicking giving these names. So for the general manager, you know, I'm breaking this down by projected salary, and you could, you know, either plug in those monthly amounts or you could do what I'm doing here, allocate annual amount and plug in the full year amount in that full year column and spread it across the months evenly or maybe based on last year's proportions biweekly. And then, you know, for federal tax here, it's a simple calculation The federal tax times general manager salary. Right? Same exact way I created that formula as before. And then state tax doing the same thing with benefits. And what's nice is, you know, once you create a set of logic like this that you then wanna duplicate maybe for another manager, you can right click, copy that logic, come down here, and hit paste. And that's exactly what I did with the assistant manager. Right? So I don't have to sit there and add the lines one by one. All the formulas will be in place. You can change the name. Instead of general manager, will say assistant manager, and you obviously change the salary amounts as well. So that copy and paste saves a ton of time. And when it comes to, you know, the folks working the front desk and, you know, the drive through, there's more turnover there. So we're not doing it by a named employee. We're doing a headcount calculation. So crew headcount, you know, we're hiring, you know, new employees in in May, as well as September and November. Right? Those numbers are going up. And then we have a line that represents the average hours worked per month, average hourly rates per month, and then we're multiplying those three lines together in accrued wages. Right? As you could see. I'm doing a simple calculation for the federal taxes. Right? Federal tax times accrued wages. Same thing with the state tax. Now what this is not doing is it is not incorporating specific federal tax percentages and weight limits and state taxes. There is another more detailed way to do that and also create what's called a smart group. So where you take this one set of logic and duplicate it, know, ten more times. Right? Because you have ten people within that specific group that are all calculated the same way. It just might have different salary amounts. So that is based on this account type right here. Right? So when you add a line in here, by default, most of the lines will just be set to assumption, but you can switch that to payroll, which gives you this payroll tax option right here. But before you can apply the payroll tax option, you need to establish what those payroll tax rates are, and you can even add some payroll related expenses, so, like, different benefits, health insurance, stuff like that that you wanna incorporate too. And that's done. And you probably and some of you remember this from two weeks ago in class one. That's done at the company level settings. I gotta move this. And we touched on it for a second when we were creating this company from, you know, from scratch. And we said, you don't, you know, you don't need to do it right away. Right? You could always come back to it. So that's what this edit payroll tax button right here is. So when you're first creating the company, you could do it right away or you can come back to it like I am. And, you know, when you click on it, it'll burst out out blank, but then you could start to add taxes to the table by clicking add tax here. And, you know, you're giving the tax a name. You're specifying whether it's a state or federal tax. If it's a state, then it's gonna ask you to name the state. Right? So choose the state in this drop down. And then you just plug in the corresponding tax rate and if it has a wage limit, tax. Right? So for something like FICA, we got six point two percent. There's the cap. I can go to edit this if I need to. It's federal, so I don't have to select the state. Medicare. Right? There is no tax cap. Right? So I didn't check check that there. One point four five percent. And then we're going with the food there. Six percent at six thousand. And then we just did New York, soda, four point five percent at ten thousand. So now we have and like I mentioned earlier, if you wanna add and, Christian, maybe you have a good example of something that you used with the with the user in the past. But, you know, if you wanna add, you know, a benefit, type calculation in here, you know, that acts the same way as, payroll tax with percentage and a cap, you can, you know, you can name these whatever you'd like. Typically, we're seeing, you know, payroll taxes being entered here, but we've seen folks use it. Yeah. I mean, like, you could have a you could have a four zero one k match up to a certain point. Right? You could you know? Yeah. So you could drive a benefit calculation. You know, six percent match on four zero one k contributions, you know, up to a certain dollar amount each year. So after you add those, you can click and go back. And then I added a brand new assumptions tab, and I'm gonna I called this payroll tax group. Right? You can give it a better name based on, you know, the employee group that you're doing this for. Say it's like for a support team, you know, with, five employees in there, a few lines. So this is brand new assumption tab. We're gonna add a line. We'll just keep this very generic. Names, we'll call this employee one salary. And we're gonna stick with manual entry. We'll allocate annual amount. We'll plug in a full year amount. We'll say hundred and twenty five thousand a year, and then we'll click add. So we're adding the salary amount first because we wanna obviously multiply those payroll tax percentages, by something. Now if, know, there's other forms of income, whether it's bonus, missions, you know, stuff like that, you could add the clients and then, add them up into a total compensation line that you're then multiplying the tax by. In this case, we're gonna keep it simple since we only got about nine minutes left. This is taking a little bit longer than expected. That frees up. Yeah. Let me do a poll question here. What part of your budget forecasting process gives you the most trouble? Revenue, payroll, inventory, ARAP? Whatever. K. I'm gonna close the poll in five four three two one. Alright. So now that we have the salary in there, we're gonna add another one. FICA. Alright. So this is where we're gonna change the account type, the payroll. I think it gives me this method. I can then select federal. It's like a and I wanna make sure I'm looking it up to the correct south. Alright. So there you go. Click add. And we're just gonna work down the line here. Notice I'm starting each description with the same description. Say Medicare. And that's gonna be important here in a moment when we do our smart group. Federal, Medicare. Yeah. We got two more. You can see we're setting the wage limit there pretty quick in the first months for the food. Alright. We're hitting their wage limit there too as well. So things like, you know, this, we haven't hit the wage limit there yet, but, you know, person was making a lot more. We'll say for this it's like a well, does it have to be more than that? There we go. So we're hitting that wage limit in December. Now say you wanted to duplicate this for, you know, four more employees, and you don't wanna sit there and add the lines. And even though, you know, doing the right click copy logic, you'd have to do that, you know, four separate times. We have a method called a smart group where if you add, each line with the same descriptor, in this case, employee one, PlanGuru picks up on that and says, okay, there's some consistencies and descriptions here. You know, do you want to create a smart group? And how many more times do you want it to duplicate? You know, what names do you want to put in here? To employee three. We'll call this the support team. Say employee four and employee five. Right? Obviously, you'd be giving some specific names, first and last names if you wanted or position titles. And when I click okay, two things are gonna happen. Gonna take this logic, do a find and replace on the names. It's gonna duplicate all the lines and the formulas, and it's gonna automatically give me total. So I'm gonna have total salary, total FICA, total Medicare, and so on. And this might be a good time for another poll question. This takes maybe a minute or so to load, but much, much faster than, you know, sitting there and adding each line and recreating the formulas one by one. Let's just squeeze another, poll question in here. I know it's about to load, but I let I let things get behind here. How often are you updating your forecast? K. I'm gonna close the poll in five four three two one. Alright. So there's employee two, which I can then come in here and, you know, change their salary amount, obviously, whether that's typing them, you know, the monthly amounts in, or just going here and changing the annual amount, right, and have it spread evenly across the months. And then it's going to give you some totals, right? There's my total at the bottom. And you can see for most of these employees, we're hitting the wage limits there, so that's why you're seeing a bunch of zeros starting in May there. And then you could take these totals and link them to the corresponding expense accounts on the income statement. Right? So it saves you a lot a lot of time, you know, with the that level of detail that you're looking for and being able to still take those totals and link them to the correct accounts. So smart groups are one of our newer features and, have been quite popular for some of our power users. And that's, you know, just one example. Could be breaking down products. Right? You create a set of logic that has, you know, set of lines that's calculating the, revenue per product. Right? Units sold times unit price. It gives you product revenue, and then you have the cost per product to give you COGS. And then maybe you're even doing a little bit of an inventory breakdown per product. You do it for the first products. Right? As long as you give it the same descriptor at the beginning, the product name, you can create a smart group for another, you know, twenty products. Have it all pull up, take those totals and link them to the corresponding income statement and balance sheet accounts. So these assumptions tabs here provide that level of detail that, you know, helps you tailor your model to your specific business industry needs and everything that you build in here. Like you'll see next week is reportable as well. We'll be able to create some charts, graphs, tables, and stuff like that and dashboards referencing these these lines that you add to the assumptions. That's probably where we should stop today since we're coming up, since we're at two two PM here. Think we have may have may have one, yeah, whole question left. Right? Question for team? Okay. So, well, thank you to everyone who attended today. If you got any remaining questions, You can put them in the questions field. Or, you know, at this point, if you wanna if you want me to unmute anyone, I'm happy to unmute you if you have a question and you wanna say out loud. Just put something in the chat or raise your hand. If not, I'm gonna close the poll in five, four, three, two, one, and, we'll see everybody next Wednesday. Yes. Have a great week. Thanks for coming by, guys. Thanks. Bye.